Revolutionizing workplace services with WaaS

This centralized ministry provides procurement, infrastructure, contracting, and IT services to the other ministries within the provincial government.

This Canadian province used to employ a traditional approach to workstation management and support: multiple suppliers handling hardware provision, building, and imaging, testing, and end-user support services. The result was spiralling costs and a lack of accountability.

Moreover, employees had challenges acquiring new devices or upgrades, resulting in an aged install base that was prone to performance issues and resulted in poor end-user satisfaction. These issues were exacerbated in more remote customer locations.

The province – and its 30,000 users – therefore wanted to find a single partner to meet all its workstation needs at a simple per user, per device, per month fee.

Following a competitive market evaluation, the province selected Fujitsu based on its progressive and integrated approach, its leading position in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, and its abundance of referenceable public sector customers.

Fujitsu introduced its ground-breaking WaaS model – a fusion of device provision and management with a comprehensive array of complimentary support functions. WaaS is built as an end-to-end service, designed, and engineered to be user-centric and data-driven.

A team of Fujitsu experts created a single standard operating environment, meaning that Fujitsu technicians can handle many more issues remotely and users find it much easier to set up their own device and solve their own issues. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this self-service flexibility became immensely important.

WaaS also provides real-time data analytics on performance and a range of intelligent tools that further enhance the user experience while improving their productivity. In total, Fujitsu has deployed more than 20,000 standard desktops, more than 12,000 laptops, and about 4,000 specialist devices for field, executive, and power users. Fujitsu will refresh approximately more than 7,000 devices every year over the 10-year contract.

The new WaaS model not only simplifies device imaging, deployment, and support, it also ensures an affordable, predictable cost per month with minimal upfront investment. It has innovation baked in – with specific mechanisms that evolve as roles, devices, and tasks change.

The data-driven aspect provides the ability to measure and monitor activity across the enterprise, enabling proactive, predictive analysis to ensure issues are resolved before they even occur. By optimizing performance across each device’s lifecycle, downtime is at an all-time low and user satisfaction has increased.

With so many employees working from home during the pandemic, Fujitsu recognizes that it needs to strive for a consistent user experience, whether that user is based in a central or a remote location. If a user needs a new device, Fujitsu aims to deliver it within two hours even though this can be extremely difficult to achieve in some very rural locations.

The province and Fujitsu are now exploring new areas for collaboration; where the user experience (UX) will be put at the heart of everything the province will do.