SCHULTHEISS Wohnbau – Citrix VDI for mobile, high-performance workplaces

SCHULTHEISS Wohnbau – Citrix VDI for mobile, high-performance workplaces.

SCHULTHEISS Wohnbau AG turns the dream of turnkey homes and commercial premises into reality around Nuremberg, Fürth and Erlangen. Over 100 employees working in architecture, structural engineering, admin, marketing and IT plan, implement and marketing construction projects with mobile, high-performance and standardised workstations provided by Bechtle. SCHULTHEISS now is the proud owner of a modern on-prem data centre with Dell hosts. Thanks to Citrix Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), the new Igel thin clients are powerful workstations that have even been designed to handle CAD applications.

Project details.

Services

Virtualization
Managed Services
Modern Workplace

Industry

Manufacturing

Manufacturer

Dell, HPE, Citrix, Igel

Company size

< 250 employees

Challenge.

For 30 years, SCHULTHEISS Wohnbau AG has been building apartments and houses in Nuremberg, Fürth and Erlangen, providing home owners with turnkey properties direct from the developers. So far, SCHULTHEISS has turned over 4,000 units into brand new homes. Deeply rooted in the Franconia region of central Germany, the company employs project developers, architects, construction engineers, energy consultants, structural engineers, technicians, interior designers, real estate consultants and IT techs. Bechtle had worked for the company for many years, carefully setting up the IT infrastructure to grow with the business that flexibly supports its customers’ as they realise their property dreams. To provide its 135 members of staff with greater independence and mobility, SCHULTHEISS were looking to roll out more flexible workplaces that could be deployed quickly thanks to standardisation. SCHULTHEISS Wohnbau were looking to leverage new technologies to enable the standardised deployment of virtual desktops and being able to work anywhere at anytime.

Bechtle planned the implementation of our new IT infrastructure from start to finish. The company followed a structured and well-thought through approach to realise a modern workplace infrastructure even though we reconsidered what we wanted at one point. We are incredibly happy with the result as now every employee can take advantage of mobile working meaning we have been able to keep hold of our staff despite moving.

Marko Beck, Digitalisation Officer, SCHULTHEISS Wohnbau AG

Solution.

Virtual workspaces are at the heart of the new IT environment. The 30 existing CAD workstations needed to have enough power to tackle day-to-day architectural and statistical work, but SCHULTHEISS and Bechtle determined the exact parameters for the IT in a joint kick-off workshop. The decision was quickly made to use Citrix as the platform, with Citrix Cloud proving itself to be an especially efficient solution for the housing developer during a subsequent proof of concept. Bechtle’s systems engineers also recommended a move into the cloud and so Bechtle and SCHULTHEISS determined the various use cases for Citrix. However, instead of different application areas, SCHULTHEISS decided to equip every part of its business—including its subsidiary SCHULTHEISS Hoch- und Tiefbau GmbH—with CAD performance. The architects with their CAD workstations therefore received the same workloads as the structural engineers, marketing with its Adobe product suite, IT and the entire office. Bit by bit, Bechtle configured the required on-premise infrastructure made up of Dell servers and equipped with NVIDIA graphics cards and updated the servers to the latest operating system version. A Citrix Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) virtualised the workstations making them much faster than those that had previously been in place.

Bechtle also migrated all management components to the Citrix Cloud Service while SCHULTHEISS employed a virtual member server for internal services such as database and applications services. The employees now use Igel thin clients that have proven to be truly high-performance endpoints for VDI workspaces. For each of the company’s use cases, Bechtle created an image so that its managed services team can always keep up-to-date, thus standardising the workstations allowing the thin clients to be used anywhere. Now, working wherever and whenever they like with exactly the same performance is possible for the staff, as is using their own devices. Communication and data sharing between colleagues takes place using Microsoft 365 tools such as Teams, Outlook ad SharePoint. At the same time the server and client hardware was renewed, Bechtle created a heatmap of the office LAN and WLAN at SCHULTHEISS and its subsidiary, SCHULTHEISS Hoch- und Tiefbau GmbH. It relaid the passive cabling and updated it with the latest HPE Aruba Access Points. SCHULTHEISS also commissioned Bechtle Managed Services meaning that the IT company now fully manages server, client and WLAN operations from a single source.

Business benefits.

With Bechtle Managed Services as well as the new standardised and virtualised IT environment, SCHULTHEISS Wohnbau AG and its subsidiary, SCHULTHEISS Hoch- und Tiefbau GmbH, now has the flexible workspaces it was looking for. Its employees are now able to work from anywhere at any time without having to compromise on performance making possible attractive and flexible working hours for both full and part time employees—a significant competitive advantage SCHULTHEISS Wohnbau AG can leverage to retain skilled workers and attract new talent.