Since 1996, O2 care services has been a leader in providing quality household cleaning, childcare, assistance for the elderly and disabled, gardening and other home services. Headquartered in Le Mans, France, O2 maintains a workforce of 14,000 care workers and 320 offices that serve more than 60,000 clients across France. With the growing demand for home care services, O2 needed a way to improve efficiency across its distributed workforce. Although O2 enabled care workers and business employees to use mobile devices for planning and time collection, the company lacked a way to enroll, configure, and manage the devices. Devices had to be delivered to IT and then IT admins had to manually configure and update devices and distribute to all employees, which was a time-consuming and inefficient process. In addition, care workers relied on a mobile app with basic functionality that required them to physically visit local offices in order to update or troubleshoot the app, which took valuable time away from serving clients.
To streamline device configuration and mobile productivity for task workers, O2 chose MobileIron for its industry-leading unified endpoint management (UEM) platform. With MobileIron and zero-touch enrollment (ZTE), O2 has been able to accelerate device configuration and deployment because admins can now provision devices over the air with no manual intervention or user action required. In addition, MobileIron enables IT admins to administer and update new versions of secure mobile apps through the MobileIron enterprise app store. This allows all 14,000 care workers to quickly open the apps they need to access job information and update case files. Mobile knowledge workers can also use secure devices and apps to collaborate faster and more seamlessly wherever they work.

MobileIron Cloud accelerates mobile device management
O2 wanted an easier way to configure 14,000 Android devices for home care workers, and office workers. The goal was to simplify device provisioning and app distribution from a comprehensive UEM platform that could scale with the growth of the company.
“When I joined the company, my goal was to help make our device provisioning process as fast and efficient as possible because the supply lead time was too long and our IT admins were spending too much time configuring, managing, and delivering devices,” said Chadi Mraghni, CIO of O2 care services. “I knew we needed a UEM provider that could scale to support a large Android deployment, which is why we chose MobileIron Cloud. Plus, using cloud-based UEM we don’t have to maintain or upgrade on-premises hardware to scale with our business needs.”
O2 uses MobileIron Cloud to set up thousands of company-owned Android devices configured with Android Enterprise. Zero-touch enrollment through Android and MobileIron allows mobile workers to start using their devices right away, without any tedious setup required.
“By provisioning devices through MobileIron Cloud, we’ve been able to reduce the number of admins needed to manage devices, which allows IT staff to spend more of their time on other strategic tasks. We’ve also reduced setup time in local offices by 10-15 minutes per device, which is a tremendous time and costs savings when you multiply that by thousands of devices,” said Chadi Mraghni.

Secure mobile apps help care workers focus on clients, not technology
With MobileIron, O2 has been able to deploy, configure, and secure corporate apps on devices through Managed Google Play. For example, each care worker’s device is configured with “O2 and Me,” a company app that supports multiple functions. The app gives care workers the client address, instructions on how to access the client’s home, and details about the job request. Additionally, timekeeping is fast and efficient because the worker can simply scan the client’s QR code they receive when signing up with O2, which instantly starts tracking the care worker’s time in the home from start to finish. Capturing the data on the app gives the back office access in order to simplify the invoices and payroll process. Care workers can also use O2 and Me to view several weeks of jobs in advance so they can plan accordingly. Updates are added in real time, so the worker can find out about schedule changes or cancellations ahead of time.

Simplified security and compliance
In addition to improving device management and productivity, O2 has greatly simplified the security of its devices everywhere. For example, when two employee devices were stolen and sold to a pawn shop, unauthorized users couldn’t access corporate apps or client information because the devices had been reported as stolen and remotely locked down by IT.
Because of MobileIron’s built-in device and app security features, O2 is able to meet compliance requirements for regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that set certain requirements for protecting personal data on mobile devices.

Looking ahead: Expanding secure mobile apps to clients
In the future, O2 is looking to develop a client-facing application that can be securely deployed and managed through MobileIron.
“Our goal is to fully leverage all of the capabilities available to us through the MobileIron platform,” said Mraghni. “With MobileIron, we’ve achieved tremendous gains in efficiency and productivity across our IT and care worker teams, and we look forward to extending that mobile experience to our clients.”