Macquarie Telecom rolled out SD-WAN services across clothing company City Beach’s 66 stores to provide a more stable and scalable network and allow it to focus on technical innovation rather than resolving system errors.
The surf, skate and street fashion brand decided it needed to roll out SD-WAN and improved NBN connectivity, telephony and Wi-Fi services after several system outages during 2020 interrupted its increasing online sale.
City Beach chief information officer Rhian Greenway said its previous technology stack was not equipped to deal with the higher demand from customers and was diverting its IT team to resolving administrative problems and systems errors instead of focusing on innovation.
“It was apparent our technology stack lacked the stability and scalability required to meet customer expectations around reliability and efficiency, but also the needs of our staff,” Greenway said.
“We had to push back anything that might interrupt the core business of allocating stock and sales reporting, resulting in quite a narrow technology focus.”
MacTel was engaged to provide a virtual data centre, Wi-Fi across its warehouses powered by Juniper Networks, a telephony platform and a company-wide rollout of SD-WAN, which was completed over five months.
Commenting on the upgrade, Macquarie Telecom group executive Luke Clifton said it was “imperative for organisations to shrug free of outdated technology to properly serve customers and ensure staff have the tools and speed to do their jobs properly.”
“This is another example of two Australian companies coming together to deliver on this vision and ensure better experiences for everyone,” he said,
Juniper Networks vice president and general manager Australia and New Zealand Bruce Bennie added that City Beach’s had reaped the benefits of AI-driven solutions and industry-leading switches.
“We’re eager to see how City Beach uses its access to a reliable network, visibility into the customer experience and digital engagement and analytics platform to improve its processes in the future.”
Greenway also said the stability provided by SD-WAN enabled City Beach to have a much stabler peak period across the retail network.
“With the previous technology stack, we experienced an array of outages, and the transition to Macquarie uncovered a lot of Wi-Fi blackspots in our warehouses. Last year’s peak season, due largely to the SD-WAN stability, we had a much smoother trade across our retail network.”
Greenway said that as a result of the upgrade its IT team was able to invest its resources in much more rewarding projects.
“With modern systems, we’ve been able to evolve our focus beyond break fixes, and we’ve now got a full enterprise resource planning team that does development, design, reporting and analytics. The latter has allowed us to be more agile with trialling new initiatives and moving with technology trends.”
City Beach said that over the next six months, the organisation would introduce Microsoft Teams for its staff and Click and Collect services for its customers.
Staff would also be given headsets that scan customer orders to retrieve instant information about the aisle and pit locations of products, which the company said would make the delivery of customer orders more efficient and prevent mistakes in the picking and packing process.
Source: https://www.crn.com.au/news/macquarie-telecom-rolls-out-sd-wan-to-retailer-city-beach-581132