Dealership managed to move about 1,500 employees from the office to the home office with Citrix Workspace
Arteris, a company specialized in highway management, which manages 3,200 kilometers of roads in the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, Santa Catarina and Paraná, has proven that it is possible to promote flexible work even in companies whose main business requires physical.
In March 2020, the company moved around 1,500 employees from the offices and call center to remote work with the specialized advice of the company LGTi and adoption of the Citrix Workspace solution to meet Arteris' business contingency plan in the face of the pandemic. of Covid-19. The model surprised managers by the security and agility in the delivery of applications from the simplest to the most complex.
Although a good part of the operation is physical, about a third of the employees worked in the offices managing the 998 toll lanes and 47 plazas through which vehicles transit that make an average of 1 million passes per day, in addition to the 15 thousand IoT devices scattered around. along the highways, such as the surveillance cameras scattered in 80% along the route.
Arteris' logistics corridor serves a part of Mercosur's trade and provides adequate infrastructure for transporting industrial production and export cargo, in addition to transporting products from the interior to coastal ports and passenger vehicles.
“For eight years we have used the Citrix solution in its simplest model, which allows remote access to the internal infrastructure. When it was necessary to vacate offices to maintain social isolation, we needed to think of a solution to continue business safely with employees working from home on the most different devices. We chose Citrix because of the proximity we already had with the company and for being an easy-to-implement tool”, explains Luiz Eduardo Ritzmann, CTO of Arteris.
Technological Infrastructure
“Arteris' robust technological infrastructure facilitated the speed with which the operation was moved to remote work”, explains Geraldo Costa, Sales executive at Citrix. The company operates eight highways that are interconnected by a private network that has a fiber optic backbone and four main data centers in a hyperconverged model, with the company's applications running on the concept of private cloud. In addition, the complexity led the utility to build a NOC (Network Operations Center) that operates around the clock monitoring the entire infrastructure.
According to Ritzmann, an important feature of the company is having a very large set of IoTs spread across the highways, approximately 15,000, including cameras, traffic monitoring sensors (SATs), message boards, highways with Wi-Fi throughout the route, in addition to the numerous IoTs at toll points, which have gates, networks, sensors, optical barriers and the entire system that manages the automatic toll and manual toll parts.
He explains that this infrastructure is necessary for the company's critical operation, which requires the frequent use of robust applications for toll collection management, traffic management, highway events (such as works, congestion, accidents and animals on the lane), access to surveillance cameras, search for data in the business intelligence and connection with the other IoTs that are on the edge.
All of the company's applications are within the Citrix solution, both those that consume little traffic, such as emails, and applications that demand a high volume of data, such as Power BI query tools.
“Citrix Workspace gives us security, which is essential for our non-stop, mission-critical operation. In addition, it has the advantage of working on any device. So, even using old equipment, as happened when we sent all the employees home and many started working from their personal device until they were able to get the machines in the offices. Our attendants were able to make a Power BI query, access a camera on the highway, with the same speed and without congesting our links. The Citrix solution was fundamental in this process of migration to the home office”, concludes Ritzmann.
The home office experience was welcomed by Arteris and continues to this day. The company started the reopening of the office in May 2021 on an optional basis, for those who prefer to work on site.
The company intends to expand the use of resources and functionalities of the Citrix Workspace tool in its real concept. Currently, the technology is being used in its simplest form as a remote terminal, providing a layer of protection and extension into the home office.
According to Ritzmann, even in the remote terminal proposal, the solution greatly facilitates management and security. It is possible to publish everything the employee needs, improve bandwidth and traffic efficiency, in addition to having an encapsulated, from a security point of view, which makes it very structural to the continuity of Arteris' business.
“Arteris carries out essential work on important highways that connect the economic strength of the South and Southeast regions of Brazil. Knowing that our solutions helped the company in business continuity is a source of pride for Citrix”, says Luciana Pinheiro, Sales Director at Citrix Brazil. "In addition to maintaining the physical and digital security of workers, Arteris can now expand its use of Citrix Workspace to create new digital workspaces that accelerate productivity."
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