Allied Carpets fits IGEL thin clients in 222 stores across the UK. Energy savings of £70,000 per year from thin client deployment. At least £1m of additional income estimated by centralising IT systems.

Allied Carpets is the UK’s best known name in flooring and has had a reputation for providing quality carpets from leading manufacturers for the past 50 years. With 220 stores, Allied Carpets and the Scottish General George stores are a division of Tapis Saint Maclou, Europe’s largest carpet retailer.

So when Allied Carpets wanted to centralise its IT systems to improve customer service, stock control and ordering times, it turned to IGEL Technologies for the all important thin client store devices.

Allied’s IT Infrastructure was wearing thin
Traditionally, Allied Carpets had had PCs in each of its 220 stores with servers storing local customer information. “It was proving more and more time consuming and expensive to manage,” said Ken Moss, Head of IT for Allied Carpets. “We knew that centralising the IT system would provide major head office and in-store benefits.”

By installing a server based computing solution, Allied realised that it could centralise its customer management systems, provide real-time information on product availability to stores and improve on IT management.

Centralisation key to service improvements and management savings
Allied originally implemented Microsoft’s Terminal Services and Remote Desktop Protocol connecting IBM servers in its Orpington headquarters to 7 pilot stores equipped with Neoware thin clients

“Following the trial, however, we decided to use IGEL as our thin client supplier because of the build quality of the thin clients, the capability of the IGEL management software and the support of the team,” said Ken Moss. “With IGEL we were able to achieve exactly what we wanted for the price we wanted.”

Allied has now rolled out 800 of the Linux-based IGEL 2100 LX Smart series thin clients to its 222 UK stores.

“The devices are easy to deploy and reliable because they have no fan and moving parts,” said Ken. “The thin clients are secure because information is stored centrally, not locally, and simple to manage and upgrade from a central location.”

In addition to these benefits, Allied Carpets estimates it will save £70,000 per year on electricity costs because the thin clients use less power than traditional PCs and the store servers have been removed.

As well as the in-store benefits, the IT overhaul has also made it easier for the company to integrate its systems, allows sales staff to log onto the system from any site and offers more up-to-date management information to be generated.

In total, Allied believes that the system could be responsible for enabling the company to generate an additional £1m of income over the next 12 months.