General Equipment & Supplies, Inc. 

Providing quality construction equipment 

General Equipment & Supplies was founded in 1984 with a focus on providing heavy construction and aggregate equipment to businesses and municipal governments in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Iowa. Its products are particularly relevant in the construction, mining, and oil exploration industries.

Since its founding, the company has grown to include over 250 employees in 10 U.S. locations throughout its target region, along with two locations in Canada.

Brent Wayne is the senior systems administrator at General Equipment & Supplies. As part of a three-person IT team overseeing 391 devices across 300 employees, Brent stays busy. That’s why efficiency is key. “The goal in any given day is to try to find faster, easier ways to do things and to automate whatever we can automate, which is where PDQ came in.”

While the business staff works out of the office, General Equipment & Supplies employs a lot of field service techs who rarely set foot in the building, leaving the IT team to manage a mixture of on-prem and remote devices.

“With so many people working remote, I can't count on the machines to ever check in,” said Brent.

Adding to the complexity, truck drivers transporting the equipment must be prepared to provide load information, tracking information, permits, and everything else the DOT requires. They may work from a desktop when they’re at a branch, but they rely on tablets or mobile devices while on the road. Consistent access to up-to-date information is critical.

Inheriting PDQ Deploy & Inventory

When Brent joined General Equipment & Supplies, a previous admin already had PDQ Deploy & Inventory in place. Needing to free up time for other projects, Brent and a help desk technician quickly went to work automating software installs and uninstalls.

They soon realized that dynamic groups also allowed them to apply Microsoft Defender recommendations, such as registry changes and software settings, en masse by looking for impacted devices and automations that put the settings in place and correcting incorrect settings.

"We end up having computers that secure themselves automatically,” said Brent.

Better still, the IT team can easily monitor the progress by watching computers move from the dynamic group that needs something to the dynamic group that doesn’t need something.

“We have visibility of what needs to be done and what has been done, and you can watch it take care of itself.”

Switching to PDQ Connect

Brent’s team was already in the process of transitioning away from workloads that required a VPN connection. They were looking for an online, hosted solution similar to PDQ Deploy & Inventory. That’s when they stumbled upon PDQ Connect.

“As soon as we saw that it was online, the gears clicked immediately for us because we knew that's what we wanted.”

Streamlining processes with PDQ Connect

After trialing the product, the team began incorporating PDQ Connect and migrating off PDQ Deploy & Inventory. “I'm in PDQ Connect quite a bit, more for the inventory side of things. I set up automations to take care of things for the help desk and look for other ways to automate our work.” 

Here are a few examples of how the team leverages PDQ Connect to automate IT tasks:

Device groups for visibility & decision-making

With so many team members traveling, it’s hard to track where computers are supposed to be versus where they actually are. To overcome this, Brent set up groups that look for all computers on location-specific subnets. "This way, I can see it live in real time. It gives us the ability to fix things, too.”  

Brent also uses device groups to address vulnerabilities. “We look at a lot of registry values. Adobe might have certain vulnerabilities. If you set these registry values, you can secure Adobe or other software that has some kind of setting that we want in place across the board.”  

Additionally, groups come in handy for ensuring machines don't have unnecessary software. “I look at all software on all computers, what is on this list that should not be on this list, and what can I do to automatically get rid of it,” said Brent. “And then the other side of that coin: What are we licensed for, and what do we want our users using. If that's not on a computer, why is it not on a computer?” 

Custom scans for software license oversight

Custom scans give Brent the insight and flexibility he needs to ensure license compliance. General Equipment & Supplies uses engine diagnostics software that drops a file on a computer after it’s installed. Brent uses PDQ Connect’s custom scanners to look for files that end with the specific extension associated with that software, giving him a report on every computer with the software installed and each associated license.

Real-time reporting

While Brent and his team still maintain static documentation that they routinely update, Connect’s real-time reporting helps support it.

“I like to have the living documentation to prove it. You can have the perfect workflow, but somebody forgets to follow it or they get busy and forget to come back to it,” said Brent. “Or maybe they did the work, but they forgot to hit save, and now you have missing information!”

Automatic trigger

As a three-person team managing over 300 devices, Brent and his IT coworkers need to save time whenever they can. That’s where automation comes in.

The team has set up several actions to happen automatically. For instance, as soon as Microsoft Intune installs the PDQ agent on a target device, PDQ Connect confirms that Google Chrome is installed. If it isn’t installed or the version isn’t current, Brent created an automation to install the latest version from PDQ’s Package Library. He also set up automations to remove unwanted software and install VPN on laptops.

“In the end, we use these automations to get the computers to the state we want them.”

Inventory data for a hardware refresh project

Brent and his team are currently midway through a hardware refresh project across branch locations, and PDQ Connect is helping them identify what equipment should be replaced. Prior to setting foot on site, Brent uses Connect to review information and set priorities.   

“Before I head off to Rapid City, I jump into the Rapid City group and see what computers are there,” said Brent. “And now that I can see them, I can see the model, the memory, and the processor. For example, because Windows 11 has an 8th Gen or newer processor requirement, anything that's older is getting replaced automatically.”

Machine health checks

Since he works on a small team, security is one of the many hats Brent wears. He uses Microsoft Defender and PDQ Connect in tandem for more efficient machine health and maintenance.

When Brent sees recommendations in Microsoft Defender, he uses PDQ Connect to make them happen. "Sometimes that’s a PowerShell script or a command that needs to be run. I can also use the scanner to watch for a registry value that indicates which machines are protected.” He also uses PDQ Connect to confirm that new updates addressing vulnerabilities actually work. “Because PDQ Connect does the scans faster than Microsoft, I can see right away what is protected,” said Brent. “And then Microsoft will catch up. I'll take a look at it tomorrow, and anything that's checked in in the meantime will show that it’s updated.

“Speed is what I needed. There's nothing worse in IT than waiting on progress bars.”

PDQ Connect: Quick and easy device management

For Brent and his team at General Equipment & Supplies, PDQ Connect’s speed and automation have helped fill in the gaps they experienced with Microsoft Intune.

“I trust that the reports are up to date,” said Brent. “If we get the Microsoft Intune report that's from yesterday, I'm looking at yesterday's news.”

At the same time, PDQ Connect was easy for the team to learn.

“It's intuitive; you can look at the interface, and you don't need a degree to figure out how to use it. It's put in place in a way that makes sense.”