Founded: 1990
Employees: +4,000
Industry: Construction and Building Supplies
- Effective management of a complex VDI environment comprising Citrix Workspace and Azure Virtual Desktop along with thousands of Windows 11 endpoints
- Support 13 brands in the group operating from 335 sites throughout the country, with a large workforce of 4,000 employees
- Simplify IT management, boost the end-user experience, reduce time taken to resolve support issues – without introducing extra cost by scaling IT headcount
- ControlUp ONE platform
- 40+ support hours saved per month Automation of routine tasks like restarting apps or cleaning profile data has reduced support tickets, freeing IT teams to work on strategic work
- Real-time infrastructure insights With customizable thresholds and proactive alerts, IT teams can anticipate capacity issues and automate remediation before users are impacted.
- Enhanced visibility across the IT estate ControlUp provides deep insights into application and endpoint health—crucial for CAD and proof-of-delivery software, especially in field operations – with DEX scoring tools helping track off-network user experience, diagnosing issues like Wi-Fi reliability and software performance.
- Streamlined troubleshooting IT teams leverage ControlUp’s remote shadowing, script execution, and error log access to rapidly resolve issues—no need for physical device checks.
- Reduced support load A lean 15-person IT team efficiently supports 13 group companies and 4,000+ employees—helping the business stay agile and responsive.
Huws Gray Group is the UK’s largest independent builders’ merchant, operating from 335 branch locations nationwide and employing over 4,000 staff.
Founded in 1990, the business has grown rapidly through acquisition and offers a comprehensive range of building materials and supplies to both trade and DIY customers. A milestone moment came in 2021 with the £520 million acquisition of Grafton Group Plc’s UK merchanting business which doubled the company’s size and significantly expanded its national footprint. Today, the group includes a wide portfolio of 13 distinct operating brand, including Huws Gray, Hirebase, Timber Group, Electricbase, Frontline Bathrooms, Civils & Lintels, and Lloyd Worrall.
The Challenge
As part of its post-acquisition IT strategy, Huws Gray faced the challenge of unifying and managing an IT estate comprising a mix of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions – Citrix Workspace and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) – in addition to thousands of physical Microsoft Windows-based laptops and desktops.
Given the company’s acquisition-based growth strategy—where VDI played a key role in accelerating the integration of acquired firms, Huws Gray needed a Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management solution to help streamline IT operations and improve digital performance across its expanding IT estate and workforce.
The Solution
Huws Gray has implemented the ControlUp ONE platform across its VDI environments, Windows 11 laptops and desktops used by on-site employees, remote field employees and home-based employees accessing the network via VPN.
“We chose ControlUp because we needed a central, unified DEX platform that could support both our on-prem and cloud-based infrastructure, while saving our IT Service Desk team valuable time,” says Nathan Draper, Chief Technology Officer at Huws Gray Group. “ControlUp gives us comprehensive real-time insights 24/7, proactive alerts and automated remediation which helps us stay ahead of issues without adding headcount.”
ControlUp gives us a ‘single pane of glass’ holistic view of our IT systems and has transformed how we support our 2,500 VDI users and 1,700 desktop users,” adds Meurig Parry, Head of IT Infrastructure at Huws Gray Group. “From running scripts to make sure an application isn’t consuming excessive CPU to managing disk space and user profiles – and even our NetApp SAN storage performance – ControlUp helps us to prevent problems before colleagues even know they exist.”
The Result
Huws Gray Group has seen a range of immediate benefits from using the ControlUp ONE platform. The number of support tickets have been significantly reduced saving over 40 hours per month through real-time monitoring. This frees up the 15-person IT support team to focus on strategic projects rather than reactive support. Huws Gray is also leveraging ControlUp’s built-in tools to run ad hoc scripts and remotely shadow desktops, thereby streamlining and speeding up investigative work to troubleshoot desktop issues. In addition, error logs from the ControlUp ONE platform can easily be reviewed without physically going to check a user’s device – key given the scale of the business.
“Without ControlUp, we’d probably need a bigger IT team,” adds Draper. “It enables us to remain lean and agile – even while supporting a business of our size and complexity.
Repetitive tasks have been automated, such as automatically restarting applications or cleaning outdated user profile data which consumes storage space and can affect VDI performance.
Parry explains, “We’ve introduced a daily task that clears out files over a year old from users’ downloads folders within Citrix to keep profiles within quota. It’s a simple fix that helps prevent login issues and keeps the servers running smoothly – a good win for users and IT alike.”
Capacity planning has also been enhanced through customisable thresholds, for example, allowing IT teams to assess infrastructure needs such as when to add more storage or CPU resources and automate actions like sending alerts, terminating processes or initiating cleanup tasks when thresholds are met.
Additionally, Huws Gray Group now has enhanced visibility of endpoint performance, even for remote employees outside its corporate network. This enables issues like Wi-Fi reliability or software issues to be quickly identified – all presented via ControlUp’s DEX scoring tool.
The business has been able to consolidate and reduce the number of software tools used to manage its systems, thereby saving cost.
“The transparency and community support we get from ControlUp are also excellent,” adds Parry. “From Slack channels to user groups, the collaboration and account management from them is genuine, open and helpful. It’s more than a vendor relationship—it’s a genuine partnership.”
Looking ahead, Huws Gray Group is planning to expand its use of AVD to support various GPU-intensive CAD applications with ControlUp continuing to play a critical role in managing the performance of its Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) environments – which are crucial to the day-to-day functioning of the group.