Sheela Foam Pvt. Ltd. is India’s largest mattress manufacturer and is ranked among the top five manufacturers of Slabstock P.U. Foam in South East Asia. They have 11 manufacturing units using state-of-the-art technology across India and five manufacturing units in Australia. They serve a wide spectrum of customers through an efficient distribution network of over 100 distributors and 4500 dealers. Sheela Foam’s products include Sleepwell in India and Joyce in Australia. A combination of manufacturing excellence and a wide distribution network has helped them achieve over 40% share of the Indian P.U. foam market.
The Challenge:
Given the fact that Sheela Foam operates over a distributed geography and has a widespread network, it’s imperative that the communication within the distribution channel be very quick for the network to work efficiently. Therefore, the email solution was an area of concern for Sheela Foam’s IT department.
At the time, Sheela Foam was using a combination of email systems. As the business grew, the number of users increased as well, and Sheela Foam began facing issues related to the burgeoning cost of Microsoft Exchange user licenses.
As a result, Sheela Foam’s IT team, under the leadership of Head IT Pertisth Mankotia, began looking into consolidating the two email systems into a single email system. They were looking for a system that was fast, efficient, cost-effective, user-friendly, and scalable; plus they required the email solution to be compatible with a wide range of operating systems. The IT team looked at a wide range of email solutions, and deemed Zimbra the best fit. In particular, the team was very impressed with the flexibility, scalability and economy that Zimbra offered.
Deployment Overview:
The Zimbra deployment was done in less than three days, during which 1,100 mailboxes were migrated to Zimbra. As Zimbra is available in multiple editions (Starter, Standard and Professional), Sheela Foam was able to offer the Starter edition to non-power users and the Professional edition to power users. This helped Sheela Foam lower licensing cost further and offer mailboxes to their dealers and distributors as well. They also leveraged Zimbra’s collaboration features, such as file sharing, scheduling, instant messaging, and mobile web client.
The Zimbra team worked very closely with the Sheela Foam team to ensure that the transition was extremely easy and seamless. “The team did a great job by providing us with all the support we needed during the transition. The solution has turned out to be a perfect fit for our requirements with the numerous benefits it offers us in comparison to our earlier set-up,” said Pertisth Mankotia, Head IT at Sheela Foam.
Business Results and Benefits:
Since choosing Zimbra, Sheela Foam has experienced the following benefits:
Easy messaging and collaboration
The feature-rich browser-based experience of Zimbra allows users to stay connected securely anywhere to any device or platform. The Briefcase feature also allows users to share large files. Zimlets give the ability to integrate third party applications into the email client, thereby enhancing user productivity and experience.
Ease of migration
As Zimbra offers native migration tools, Sheela Foam did not require a third party tool for migrating their users from Microsoft Exchange to Zimbra.
Simple and flexible licensing
Zimbra’s uncomplicated licensing has allowed Sheela Foam to scale up their email system to include more users with the Starter or Professional editions. This helped them to lower the licensing cost by almost a tenth of what they would have otherwise spent on Microsoft Exchange licenses.
Reduction in total cost of ownership
Sheela Foam was able to drastically reduce costs on licensing, hardware requirements and in-built features, such as storage tiering (HSM), file sharing (briefcase) and backup tools. This would have cost them additionally had they chosen to go with other competitive solutions, including Microsoft Exchange.
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