Hillmann & Ploog GmbH & Co.KG is a traditional company with 14 locations in northern Germany that specialises in electrical wholesale. With 350 employees and a turnover of 150 million euros, the company is a classic medium-sized company. Since not all employees need a workstation with a computer, such as those in the warehouse, NinjaOne currently manages 210 devices. However, this number will continue to grow because new companies are to be integrated into the company’s IT after acquisitions. We had the interview with Oliver Dröse, who has been involved in IT at Hillmann & Ploog for over 18 years, today in a leading position.
Performance problems were the trigger for a reorientation
For more than 10 years before the Corona pandemic began, Hillmann & Ploog had been using thin clients with terminal servers. They relied on the technology of Igel GmbH for the management of the thin clients.
„When we were forced to work remotely due to the lockdowns, we had to deal with some significant performance difficulties with our terminal servers. Deploying via VPN connections in the home office turned out to be impractical for us. That’s why we decided to go back to „Fat Clients,“ which we now manage with NinjaOne.“
The implementation of NinjaOne went smoothly. In 2 months, 75% of all clients were already distributed. The team simply used the software distribution to roll out NinjaOne.
In the selection process , Oliver Dröse had also looked at other tools.
„Baramundi seemed to me to be a good tool, but a bit bloated. In addition, Baramundi was not originally developed for the cloud, which is noticeable today in terms of usability. With Atera, the softwaredistribution was not sufficient for us. Installing everything via Chocolatey or Custom Script was not an option for us. We wanted more flexibility. We had also tested Kace, but sales had only contacted us when we were already in the implementation phase with Ninja and as a pure Onprem solution it was also less interesting for us.“
Standardize IT with NinjaOne
After changing its strategy from thin to fat clients, Hillmann & Ploog was able to completely standardize its IT. Inventory and increased visibility make it easy to avoid misconfigurations. In addition, standard applications are automatically rolled out and patched on all devices, and the WSUS can also be replaced by NinjaOne.
„At NinjaOne, we have a complete activity log. This means that we can always trace which technician has done what on a device. Before, we sometimes had the situation that e.g. Causes of errors caused by configurations on the device were difficult to fathom. With NinjaOne, we’ve now standardized everything!“
Hillmann & Ploog relies heavily on Dell hardware. They benefit from the close integration that NinjaOne offers especially for Dell. This makes it easy for technicians to get from NinjaOne’s device information to Dell’s website. With Ninja you can also make the bios updates or updates of the network cards.
„Another reason for NinjaOne was definitely the support. We were superbly supported before and after signing the contract. Sales has always provided us with important and relevant information and technical support has proactively supported us during implementation. Working with NinjaOne’s team is great fun!“
The efficiency gains are impressive.
„With NinjaOne, the number of tickets has been greatly reduced. Overall, I would put the time saved by proactively managing with NinjaOne at 30% to 40%. Precious time that we can use today on more strategically important projects!“
