Auto Warehousing Company. When efficiency counts.
Each year, 5.5 million new cars arrive at one of Auto Warehousing Company’s (AWC) sites, where custom accessories such as sunroofs, turbo chargers, alarm systems, and other manufacturer items are installed—to put the finishing touches on a driver’s dream car. AWC has been fine-tuning the lion’s share of America’s new cars since it was founded in1962.
To manage the volume and breadth of its business, AWC moves a staggering amount of data every year—on average, half a million transactions per location, which is why the company has moved to a myriad of Apple solutions. According to CIO Dale Frantz, “As the company grew, we needed a more reliable, lower-cost, scalable solution to manage our workflow and storage,” he explains.
Seeking stability
AWC had always been a PC shop, but as the business expanded, AWC found itself classified into steeper, “enterprise” pricing schedules. Frantz calculated that upgrading the company’s existing servers and desktops would require a $1.8 million outlay, he reports, “without adding any new functionality and with no ROI.”
After briefly exploring a custom, open source solution, which required a tremendous amount of internal effort and consulting expense, the pivotal moment came when Frantz handed a MacBook Pro to an in-house developer. Once the developer saw the underpinnings of Mac OS X , he was instantly smitten. “Anything built on UNIX is more stable and secure than anything else—which was the driving force behind our decision to move to Apple,” says Frantz.
End to end integration
Following proof-of-concept testing to show that they could connect their back-end SQL Servers running their proprietary Vehicle Inventory Processing System (VIPS) to Xserve, Frantz, his IT staff, and his board forged ahead full speed. They moved some of the company’s core operations to the Mac because of the low cost, security, and stability of Mac OS X Leopard and because of Apple’s support for open standards and tools.
End to end integration
For starters, the team replaced its original file storage server with Apple-certified storage, which, according to Frantz, offered substantially more storage at less than half the cost. Next, Frantz brought in a number of Apple portable and desktop computers, which allow the staff, companywide, to hold collaborative videoconferences at their desks using iChat.
Turbo functionality and ROI
AWC now has over 100 Macs, all running Leopard. “By migrating to Mac OS X and implementing the other Apple technology, we have saved $1.45 million over what it would have cost us to update our previous solutions,” says Frantz.
Some systems run Parallels virtualization software that allows Mac OS X and Windows to operate side by side and share data in an integrated environment. VIPS runs on SQL Server on the back end, with Mac systems on the client side. Says Frantz, “Windows support calls have dropped 62 percent since we migrated to Mac OS X. The irony is that Parallels virtualization software runs our applications better than our previous operating system.”
On the horizon, AWC is looking to deploy the Wiki Server in Leopard Server for a collaborative server-based intranet environment. The AWC team plans to introduce Podcast Producer, part of Mac OS X Leopard Server, to route, review, and approve documents like expenditures and purchasing requests. The firm is also making the switch from its previous spreadsheet solution to Numbers—part of Apple’s iWork suite of business productivity tools.
“We view technology as a competitive advantage,” says Frantz. “At AWC, we’re regarded as being the best in the business for what we do. Apple tools help us maintain our consistently high standard of excellence.”
