US Foods, one of the largest food distributors in the United States, partners with approximately 300,000 restaurants and food service operations to help their businesses succeed. US Foods employs a field team of over 6,000 reps to serve customers face-to-face.
The Story
Poor Connections Leads to Lost Hours of Sales Time
Dropped connections while placing purchase orders from customer sites forced frustrated sales staff to hand-write orders and leave the field early to submit them from home. This resulted in an average of 1.1 million lost hours of sales time each year. The poor connectivity also prevented reps from accessing real-time inventory data, causing them to place orders for out-of-stock items. This naturally led to customer dissatisfaction and lost work hours as reps tried to smooth things over.
Security Challenges
Seamless Connectivity
and Roaming
Saves 1.1M Hours
of Productivity
Recoups $800,000
in Printing Costs
"Absolute Secure Access has helped us move from a reactive sales approach to a proactive one."
DANIEL CORCORAN
US FOODS MANAGER
US FOODS
The Solutions
How They Did It
Continuous Connectivity Improves Productivity and Efficiency in the Field
Thanks to Absolute Secure Access, US Foods employees now maintain continuous, reliable connections while roaming through spotty coverage zones, dead spots, and weak signal areas. Field sales teams can place orders and check real-time stock levels during sales calls. “Since reps are ordering on-site, they’re able to proactively explain any exceptions and keep the customers informed,” said US Foods Manager Daniel Corcoran. Because reps no longer need to input handwritten orders when they return from the field, US Foods has achieved efficiencies that equate to more than a million productive work hours per year.
Secure, Reliable Access to Corporate Resources Saves Over $800,000 Annually
With Absolute Secure Access’ always-on connection, sales staff can now reliably access online marketing collateral and training documents. This eliminates the need to pre-print materials for 6,300 active users, resulting in over $800,000 in annual cost savings. In addition, Absolute’s examination of US Foods’ information security and management policies found that employee devices were often left vulnerable to malware until software updates could be installed back at the office. Pairing Absolute Secure Access policies with an MDM solution closes a critical security gap. US Foods now benefits from timely antivirus and OS updates during non-business hours.
The Results
Less Focus on Tech = More Customers Served
Absolute Secure Access delivers secure, always-on connectivity for US Foods’ existing applications and data, allowing the company’s mobile workforce to access accurate inventory data while out in the field with customers. Sales reps are no longer frustrated with their mobile technology and can focus on servicing more customers per day.
For US Foods, Absolute Secure Access:
- Provides seamless connectivity even when roaming through wireless dead zones
- Removes the need for repeat logins or configurations for field workers
- Conserves 1.1 million hours in productivity
- Recoups $800k in printing costs
Absolute Platform FAQ
The Absolute® Platform leverages a cloud-based, highly-available and secure multi-tenant architecture that is available across different regions. It’s comprised of a variety of foundational components that power Absolute product features that are being leveraged by the company’s enterprise customers and ecosystems partners (e.g., independent software vendors, original equipment manufacturers, or managed service providers) alike.
The Absolute Platform consists of three core components:
- Absolute Persistence Technology
Absolute Persistence® technology, a unique, patented technology is already embedded in over 600 million devices as a result of Absolute’s partnership with nearly 30 system manufacturers from around the world. Once activated, this technology is fiercely resilient and is the only solution to survive attempts to disable it, even if the device is re-imaged, the hard drive is replaced, or the firmware is updated.
No other technology can do this. Ultimately, it provides a secure, unbreakable, and always-on connection between the Absolute Platform and the endpoint, allowing you to gain unprecedented real-time visibility, control, and remediation capabilities.
- Absolute Resilience Technology
The Absolute Platform utilizes two types of patented Absolute Resilience™ technology to ensure that mission-critical applications remain healthy and operational and to provide end users with the most productive, as well as optimized remote access experience possible:
- Application Resilience™: Monitors mission-critical applications’ health and behavior; detects if missing, corrupted, or not running; and automatically repairs or re-installs components when necessary – without requiring human intervention. Application Resilience ensures security controls are working as expected and provides optimal user experience by fixing unhealthy applications. Currently more than 60 mission-critical applications are enabled for Application Resilience and more are being added frequently.
- Network Resilience™: Monitors and automatically, as well as transparently restores and optimizes unhealthy network connections so networked applications continue to operate without end user-impacting interruptions that would otherwise require manual application restarts, network re-connects, and/or re-authentications. Network Resilience allows for superior connectivity and reliability, allowing end users to focus on their tasks and not network behavior.
- Absolute Intelligence
Absolute ensures a digital tether to each device remains intact, providing you with reliable insights and intelligence from all of your endpoints to the network edge — on or off your corporate network.
Hundreds of data points are gathered and served up as insights, providing guidance on utilization, health, security and compliance posture, as well as a unified view into the entire end user experience. Applying AI-based risk assessment and user entity behavior analytics lets you go beyond the monitoring of resources and applications, allowing for automated remediation and uncompromised user productivity.
Other foundational components of the Absolute Platform that enable the Absolute Secure Endpoint™ and Secure Access™ products are as follows:
- Web console
- Mobile app
- Rules and policy engine
- Alerts
- Dashboards
- APIs
- Application Persistence-as-a-Service SDK
- Third-party integrations (e.g., SIEM, ITSM)
Customers can leverage the Absolute Platform components through Absolute’s packaged products, APIs, and SDKs. The result will be rapid innovation. The Absolute Platform is always included in the product package of choice.
Like what you're hearing?
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Secure Endpoint
Mitigating Zero-Day Threats in a Complex Cybersecurity LandscapeLive Webinar - Sept 17, 2024 | 9AM PT
Secure Access
Leveraging AI to Protect Against Modern Cybersecurity ThreatsLive Webinar - Oct 1, 2024 | 9AM PT
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