To ensure that TIP can continue to drive customer satisfaction and a strong culture of innovation, it worked with NTT to migrate its IT environment to Azure. Andy Wyatt, Chief Information Officer at TIP, offers insight into how its collaboration with NTT has enabled its teams to focus on driving innovation in the highly competitive logistics sector, while adopting a cloud-first view of the future.
TIP Trailer Services (TIP) is a leading equipment service provider in the logistics sector. With more than 50 years’ experience, the organisation is an expert in providing leasing and rental, maintenance and repair, digital solutions and sales of used equipment that a customer will require during the life cycle of a trailer, truck, or other types of equipment.
Headquartered in Amsterdam, it serves its customers from 120 locations spread over 18 countries in Europe and North America.
To ensure that TIP can continue to drive customer satisfaction and a strong culture of innovation, it worked with NTT to migrate its IT environment to Azure. This move to the cloud ensures that its technology will be able to support its business ambitions as it continues to grow.
Leveraging NTT’s managed services for its core infrastructure, as well as for its end-user computing requirements, enables its teams to focus on driving innovation in the highly competitive logistics sector.
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,” said 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 prides itself on driving innovation, ensuring its customers can take advantage of the latest developments.
“Our vision is to remain a leader in trailer and truck rental and trailer maintenance,” said Andy Wyatt, Chief Information Officer at TIP. “To do that, we need to be able to work and collaborate across the whole of the organisation.”
To achieve this vision, it needed to reinvent the way it approached its 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. It was clear to me that the world was moving towards a cloud-only environment.
“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 and this led us to NTT,” said Wyatt.
Creating a cloud-first organisation
“We chose NTT for a number of reasons,” Wyatt continued. “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 programme 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 centre provider to Azure,” Wyatt said. “This was accomplished over about 12 months and was delivered on time and on budget. We now leverage its 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 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,” said Wyatt. “That’s grown by about 600 since we started working with NTT. We’ve been able to grow and onboard organisations 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,” said Wyatt.
“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 [in] a couple of years ago,” said Wyatt.
Ensuring business success through partnership
As an organisation that values innovation, working with NTT has enabled TIP to focus on ensuring that it continues to deliver for its customers, scaling its environment to explore the potential of new and innovative applications. This includes the expansion of its 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,” Wyatt said.
Scaling for growth
“The business benefits we’ve seen since moving to Azure with NTT have been startling,” said 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 its business-critical applications. “We’ve reduced our mean time to resolve,” said Wyatt. “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 has increased collaboration across its organisation. As it continues to expand globally, this will ensure that it can continue to build an innovative organisational culture.
“Technology helps us to share, helps us to collaborate, helps us to analyse data and helps us to serve our customers in a better way,” said Hiske Damhuis, Chief Human Resources Officer at TIP.
Driving sustainability
Creating an organisation that is sustainable in the long term is a critical part of TIP’s strategy and one that aligns with the broader partnership.
“To be a successful business, you need to be a sustainable business,” said 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 centre and reduce our carbon footprint.”
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