1. Success Brief
PCs with Intel®vPro™
Technology
Automotive
BMW Takes Remote Control
Overall, BMW
anticipates that
the adoption of
Intel®vPro™
technology will
significantly
improve its ability
to cost-effectively,
more securely and
efficiently manage
its global PC fleet.
Automating Enterprise Management with Intel®Active Management Technology
Company BMW Group is the world's largest premium automobile manufacturer and owns the
world-class brands BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce.
Product evaluated Intel® vPro™ technology and its built-in manageability capabilities using Intel® Active
Management Technology (Intel® AMT).
Challenge Responsible for the management of 100,000 PCs across its global operations, BMW’s
central IT department wanted to increase control of system platforms and boost
the efficiency of its technical support staff.
Results Evaluation tests revealed that, by integrating Intel® vPro™ technology’s Intel® AMT into
its PC environment, BMW could significantly increase its remote management capabilities
and further strengthen security.
Impact BMW anticipates that its PC fleet will be more secure and managed more cost effectively.
Next steps BMW is planning the roll-out of Intel®vPro™technology-based PCs which have Intel®
AMT built into the PC hardware.
Challenge:
The remarkable success of the BMW Group has been driven by its relentless pursuit of innovation, engineering precision and
manufacturing excellence. Technological leadership is as important for the design and manufacture of its premium
vehicles as it is for the IT infrastructure that underpins the organisation’s operations. As a result, the company’s central IT
department continually strives to improve its efficiency and performance. It recently turned its attention to how it could
better manage and support the 100,000 PCs used by BMW Group employees spread across about 20 countries.
The IT department wished to address four key issues:
• Increase efficiency of software deployments. Like most organisations, BMW’s current software distribution
method requires PCs to be switched on to receive updates. To avoid user downtime, companywide software deployments
areusuallyconductedovernightbutaredependentonusersleavingtheirPCsswitchedon.Thisleavesasmall,butsignificant,
percentage of PCs that miss the initial upgrade cycle, resulting in IT wasting valuable time on repeatedly managing the
distribution of software updates until complete compliance is achieved. BMW distributes critical patches and updates
monthly and they take, on average, 36 hours to be successfully installed on all PCs. The organisation wanted to
cut down installation time by increasing the initial hit-rate.
• Improve security. BMW has undertaken many measures to protect itself against unauthorised access and the misuse
of data. As part of this security system, it wanted a reliable method to ensure anti-virus software and virus-definition
files are kept up to date on all platforms.
• Reduce desk-side visits and PC downtime. Both the time spent on desk-side visits to resolve PC problems
and the resulting loss of employee productivity from PC downtime represent a significant cost to BMW. Downtime due to
hardware failure currently averages 4.4 hours per incident while downtime due to software failure averages 6.3 hours.
The company was therefore keen to increase the speedand success of remote problem resolution by the IT helpdesk.
• Faster, more detailed software and hardware inventories. Accurate software and hardware inventories
are needed by the BMW IT department to assist with troubleshooting and virus protection, ensure regulatory
compliance and manage maintenance contracts and software licenses. While much of the weekly inventories
are conducted automatically, there is still a requirement for some data to be collected manually. BMW wanted to increase
efficiency by eliminating manual inventory costs.
