TIP Trailer Services

Vision

Planning for an innovation-driven future

As a leading equipment provider to the logistics industry, exceptional customer service is the foundation of TIP’s business. ‘We have thousands of customers across 18 different countries,’ says Henrike Wilkens, Global Marketing and Communications Director at TIP. ‘We have 120,000 trucks and trailers on the road or in any of our 110 workshops at any time.

We’re a one-stop-shop for our customers – we provide them with everything they need to keep their fleets on the road.’

As an integrated service provider, the TIP team pride themselves on driving innovation, ensuring their customers can take advantage of the latest developments.

‘Our vision is to remain a leader in trailer and truck rental, and trailer maintenance. To do that, we need to be able to work and collaborate across the whole of the organization,’ explains Barry Wike, IT Infrastructure Director at TIP.

To achieve this vision, they needed to reinvent the way they approached their use of technology, moving from traditional on-premises and outsourced IT solutions and adopting a cloud-first view of the future.

‘We needed to look at what it would take to achieve the level of digital transformation and what we needed to do to get there, and it was clear to me that the world was moving towards a cloud-only environment,’ says TIP Chief Information Officer, Andy Wyatt.

‘In 2019 we were in a position where we needed to do something different, so we started looking for a partner who would be able to help us on our journey,’ he says, ‘and this led us to NTT.’

Transformation

Creating a cloud-first organization

‘We chose NTT for a number of reasons,’ Wyatt explains. ‘The technical solution was based on Microsoft Azure, which amplified our existing investment in Microsoft technologies, such as Office 365 and Power BI. But more than that, we saw the potential of working with NTT and how this relationship could help us continue to grow.’

The transformation program involved re-architecting TIP’s existing application environment to take full advantage of the Azure platform.

‘NTT managed the process of moving our environment from our previous data center provider to Azure. This was accomplished over about 12 months and was delivered on time and on budget,’ he says. ‘We now leverage their capabilities to manage this environment for us from the day-to-day interactions right through to supporting the deployment of any additional services we require.’

The second component of the relationship between NTT and TIP is the provision of the global service desk and supporting their end-user compute requirements.

‘We have around 3,000 employees across 18 countries and 99% of those are using, in one form or other, services provided by NTT,’ says Wike. ‘That’s grown by about 600 since we started working with NTT. We’ve been able to grow and onboard organizations that we’ve acquired easily and rapidly.’

Critical to TIP was ensuring that the environment remained secure. ‘We need to make sure we have the trust of our customers, so we’ve made sure that security is at the forefront of any solution that we put in place,’ says Wike.

‘The steps that we’ve taken in conjunction with NTT in terms of our security layers, now leave us in a far more secure position than we were a couple of years ago,’ adds Wyatt.

Results

Ensuring business success through partnership

As an organization that values innovation, working with us has enabled TIP to focus on ensuring that they continue to deliver for their customers, scaling their environment to explore the potential of new and innovative applications. This includes the expansion of their use of telematics.

‘Telematics provides our clients with insights that help decrease their operational costs and enhances sustainability by reducing fleet energy consumption, carbon emissions and carbon footprint’ says Wike.

Scaling for growth

‘The business benefits we’ve seen since moving to Azure with NTT have been startling,’ says Wyatt. ‘We’re now in a position where we’ve grown the business by around 40%. What made this growth possible was being able to scale our technology.’

Improved operational efficiency

Leveraging our managed services and our service desk has ensured that TIP has seen a dramatic improvement in the performance of their business-critical applications. ‘We’ve reduced our mean time to resolve’, says Wike. ‘We’ve also reduced our overall downtime from a lot of our applications, which has given us a number of benefits in terms of being able to provide the business with the systems they need, at the time they need them.’

Improved collaboration

By taking advantage of Microsoft 365 services, TIP have increased collaboration across their organization. As they continue to expand globally, this will ensure that they can continue to build an innovative organizational culture.

‘Technology helps us to share, helps us to collaborate, helps us to analyze data, and helps us to serve our customers in a better way’, says Hiske Damhuis, Chief Human Resources Officer at TIP.

Driving sustainability

Creating an organization that is sustainable in the long term is a critical part of TIP’s strategy and one that aligns with our broader partnership.

‘To be a successful business, you need to be a sustainable business’, says Wyatt. ‘We’re working very hard in terms of our environmental impact. The partnership that we have with NTT and the move to Azure enables us to create a greener data center and reduce our carbon footprint.’