Customer Spotlight
Shady Maple improves productivity, network performance & profitability
Kevin Porsche
IT Admin
Shady Maple
Company:
Shady Maple is a Farm market and fresh produce distributor based in Eastern Pennsylvania, USA
www.shady-maple.com
Headquarters:
Pennsylvania, US
Industry:
Grocery & Retail
Type:
B2C
Size:
130+ Employees
CurrentWare Products Used:
-
BrowseControl
Improve productivity by restricting and filtering non-work related websites and applications and secure your network by blocking malicious websites and downloads
-
BrowseReporterMonitor internet and application activity with remote screen capturing, tracking usage, generating reports, and e-mail alerting
Prior to implementing CurrentWare, Shady Maple had gone through a period of expansion and the company sought to optimize productivity among their staff. The firm understood the huge cost to business of lost productivity, and their IT administrator Kevin Porsche had been looking for ways to monitor web-browsing history. He knew that there had to be a better solution than checking each individual computer.
“It was...going onto the (employee)’s machine and hoping that they didn’t clear out their history, things of that nature. The more requests I got from our HR department requesting to know what the user was doing at a particular point in time, it became apparent that we needed to get a central management system in place for our web monitoring activity.” Kevin Porsche, IT Administrator
As the number of employees grew, Shady Maple needed a system that was scalable. A system that allowed them to gain an insight into the productivity of each individual member of staff despite no longer necessarily being able to commit the time to physically analyze the workplace behavior of each employee. As is often overlooked, a larger business cannot operate in the same way as a smaller one can, and Porsche admitted that it took him some time to come to this realization:
Kevin wanted to see at the click-of-a-button how much of an employee’s day was spent browsing on the internet, and how much time was spent working. Simultaneously, Porsche wanted to solve a related issue pertaining to high bandwidth consumption amid suspicions that employees were often watching and downloading videos. Whilst not directly causing a loss in productivity, high consumption would slow down the network and subsequently cause further performance issues.
After trialing various solutions, Porsche found CurrentWare’s BrowseControl and BrowseReporter to be just what he was looking for. With its straightforward monitoring reports, CurrentWare enabled him, with the click-of-a-button, to see exactly how much of an employee’s day was spent browsing on the internet. Any issues could be addressed concurrently through the software by using the instant web-filtering and application blocking features to put an immediate end to any unproductive habits.
“There wasn’t any 360-page instruction manual - it just worked! When we first saw the employee tracking reports we were totally surprised by some of the behaviors and habits that had gone under the radar.”
In light of the new findings, BrowseReporter’s variety of employee monitoring reports were shown to some employees as evidence of their unproductive browsing habits. The Total Browsing Time report, which shows exactly how much time employees were spending on productive/unproductive websites and applications turned out to be particularly effective in identifying inefficiencies. “The HR department suddenly gained the ability to present tangible evidence of disinclination to employees who had been underperforming or slacking on the job."
Whilst some of these cases were simply dissolvable through the filtering of certain websites and applications, Porsche did admit that some employees were dismissed as a consequence of recurring idleness indicated by CurrentWare’s reports. Suspicions that large file downloads and video streaming had been causing high network congestion were verified through the utilization of the integrated bandwidth tracking feature and subsequently blocked with BrowseControl.
As expected, the intuitive, scalable solution presented by CurrentWare spared Porsche the task of training various members of his team on how to use the software. Instead, he was able to focus on the other pressing matters that arose through the company’s expansion. All the while, CurrentWare continued to save Shady Maple uncountable hours of productivity, and ultimately provided a huge saving on employee wages.
“Being able to identify negative browsing trends and put a stop to them within a couple of hours has meant that our employees are focused on the job almost all of the time. We have become an extremely efficient workforce.”
Several staff have also reported faster network speeds since the culprits of high bandwidth usage were identified. Shady Maple’s relationship with CurrentWare has continued to move from strength-to-strength during the eleven-year association that the companies have shared. Taking on board customer feedback and collaborating with users to improve the overall experience has been an integral part of CurrentWare’s growth, and Porsche feels that Shady Maple has been a major beneficiary of this practice.
“CurrentWare takes user feedback, and actually reacts to it. We have definitely enjoyed making use of their propensity to involve feature requests from customers as part of the roadmap for future updates.”
Kevin Porsche
IT Admin
Shady Maple
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