Trek Bicycle’s device management strategy drives enhanced customer experience

Not every facet in customer experience is related to store associate engagement, ease of online search, personalization or interaction at point of sale.

The retail customer experience also relates to customers finding a needed product and getting the product shipped at a needed time — inventory and delivery expectations happening within back-end operations.

After all, if a customer can't get what they want when they want it, it's likely not going to be a fulfilling customer experience.

Those were two pain points Trek Bicycle Corp., based in Waterloo, Wisconsin, wanted to solve.

The company, which designs and manufactures bicycles and related products, has been in business for 45 years and has continually expanded with 17 Trek offices operating across 80 countries and hundreds of mobile devices being tapped in its manufacturing warehouses.

Such growth brings on back-end challenges, from hiring and training warehouse and manufacturing staff, to ensuring warehouse technology — mobile devices — were up and running and not stalling production and shipment schedules.

"We were experiencing challenges with hundreds of devices in our biggest warehouses: troubleshooting device issues, device security and lack of insight into our fleet," Tom Spoke, director of global IT, said in an email interview. "Our IT team was struggling to efficiently troubleshoot hardware issues, perform security updates and monitor device health without complete visibility into factors like battery life, device downtime and device location. As a result, Trek accumulated hours of unnecessary downtime and detrimental losses to productivity around our bottom line."

The Soti solution

That's why Trek turned to Soti, a provider of mobile and IoT device management solutions. Long-time partner RMS Omega assisted Trek in evaluating EMM tools, leading the team to Soti and the decision to deploy the Soti MobiControl and XSight, both of which are part of Soti's One Platform.

The implementation took two months. The Soti team assisted the deployment with a "proof of concept" which put the Soti One Platform in a real trial environment. It wasn't long before the time spent providing device support dropped from hours to minutes, resulting in substantial savings.

The platform features are helping the global performance bike brand gain major improvements in operational and worker efficiency and saving the company 15% to 20% in costs when it comes to employee onboarding.

Trek now has clear visibility into all devices and can monitor how, when and where they are in use. It can easily roll out updates as the IT team sets up and configures devices in a quicker and easier fashion.

The ability to quickly diagnose, support and troubleshoot issues remotely means distribution facilities can ship same-day orders so stores have available stock for all cyclists' needs.

"Soti has provided Trek with full visibility into the location of devices within our fleet, which is essential because consumers expect their favorite brands to ship out orders quickly — if not the same day," said Spoke.

Additionally, Soti MobiControl and Soti XSight have improved operational and worker efficiencies to support surging production and shipping demands.

"Our IT team can now quickly diagnose, support and troubleshoot issues remotely while allowing distribution facilities to ship same-day orders out. This ensures retailers have stock for cyclists to enjoy their next ride," Spoke said.

Peace of mind

The return on investment, according to Spoke, includes the ability to solve and prevent device issues and that means reducing the amount of stoppage time for warehouse staff.

"Implementing the Soti One platform has given us the peace of mind that we are saving more time for our business to work on our bottom line and keep our customers satisfied," he said.

His advice to retailers considering a mobility management solution is to determine a vendor's history and whether they can scale as your company scales.

"An intelligent, remote device management software is an investment for the future. The key to choosing the right enterprise mobility management solution is to find one that will have the depth and breadth of devices that are supported, and the experience to help customers and partners avoid the many pitfalls that come with poor execution of using an EMM tool. Secondly, look for an EMM solution that can help you be proactive versus reactive," advised Spoke.

He also recommends a solution that offers support for different operating systems, including Windows, Android and Linux and device types — from wearable to printers, scanners, sensors and cameras.

"This allows you the flexibility to test and change devices quickly and easily," he said.

A big misconception that many companies have about mobility management solutions is that all the options offer the same capabilities, according to Shash Anand, SVP of product strategy at Soti.

"The reality is many of our clients come to Soti after using other solutions to address their functionality, scalability, performance, flexibility of devices and user experience challenges," he said in an email interview. "The beauty of Soti One is that we can create a custom-built solution that caters to a customer's individual needs and problems and tackle them headfirst. Even more, we can also integrate with any existing infrastructure, ridding IT teams of onboarding headaches."

(Photo provided by Trek Bicycle Corp.)