GNC’s Journey to a Modern and Secure IT Environment with Ivanti

Online competition has retailers across all industries struggling to keep their brick-and-mortar stores open. GNC, a leading global specialty retailer of health and wellness products, is no stranger to this challenge with its 4,000-plus US retail locations. One way GNC is addressing this challenge is with a solid enterprise service management strategy that helps streamline operations. 

GNC was operating on a homegrown ticketing system developed 20 years prior and could no longer be changed or edited. There were also two separate ticket management systems – one for the stores and one for corporate - adding complexity. IT leadership knew it was time for a change. And with only one GNC Ivanti administrator responsible for developing, reporting and creating dashboards, there was no question that the ITSM solution had to be easy to use.

Managing assets

GNC evaluated three vendors and chose Ivanti for two reasons. The Ivanti solution allows for customization to meet the retail-specific needs of GNC, and it's easy to develop. GNC started with Ivanti for incident and change management – and for service requests and knowledge base. These have improved the overall IT processes.

For example, the new-hire process automatically creates new-hire tickets and includes the badge process, granting access to the building and specific floors. And because everything is together, users only need to go into one tool for tickets and incident trends can be tracked.

One of the most important uses that’s emerged for the company is asset management. GNC is building a configuration management database (CMDB) to track equipment across its 4,000 stores. These assets include registers, pin pads, auxiliary printers and tablets, all of which can total up to 60 pieces per store. Before Ivanti, when a store’s internet went down, a temporary device would be sent out to get the store back up and running, but GNC’s IT team had no way of tracking those devices.

Today, all those devices, which cost $1,600 each, are registered and tracked by Ivanti. GNC estimates it saves $150,000 a year with just this one improvement to their asset management.

GNC is leveraging Ivanti outside of the traditional IT for HR and security purposes. It’s also improving loss prevention practices, which are critically important in a retail environment. The loss prevention team creates and tracks tickets in Ivanti and keeps tabs on people entering and leaving GNC buildings by monitoring employee badges.

A clear picture

Ivanti is eliminating a lot of headaches for the lone GNC Ivanti administrator who reports that it’s ‘easier to do everything,’ on a day-to-day basis, including tracking tickets and reporting problems. Where IT had to pull multiple reports in the past to get one result, they get it from a single report today.  

One of the biggest advantages for GNC using Ivanti is visibility into its retail stores – seeing all the equipment and monitoring any issues at those sites. Third-party integrations are key to this functionality, automatically creating tickets and alerting on-call personnel who deal with emerging situations.

_{Note: A customer’s results are specific to its total environment/experience, of which Ivanti is a part. Individual results may vary based on each customer’s unique environment.}