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Over the years, Tomei’s business has grown from strength to strength with an increasing number of branches nationwide. However, the COVID-19 crisis has necessitated a shift in their sales and marketing activities towards embracing social media and e-commerce as effective tools to engage customers in order to remain relevant and thrive as a brand.
Tech Refresh: Re-Architecture of Conventional WAN to a Powerful, Enterprise-Grade SD-WAN Infrastructure, Empowering Business Digital Transformation
Enabling a high-availability and high-bandwidth network throughout an entire chain of retail outlets.
Industry
Jewellery Retailers and Manufacturers
Client
Listed on the main market of Bursa Malaysia, Tomei is one of the largest jewellery designers, manufacturers and retailers in Malaysia.
Background
With more than 50 years of history, Tomei has close to 60 retail stores nationwide. The Group retails its products through various channels, including physical outlets, trade shows, events, as well as online via e-commerce and social media platforms. Tomei has been a valued, long-term customer of REDtone since 2008.
Industry
Jewellery Retailers and Manufacturers
Client
Listed on the main market of Bursa Malaysia, Tomei is one of the largest jewellery designers, manufacturers and retailers in Malaysia.
Background
With more than 50 years of history, Tomei has close to 60 retail stores nationwide. The Group retails its products through various channels, including physical outlets, trade shows, events, as well as online via e-commerce and social media platforms. Tomei has been a valued, long-term customer of REDtone since 2008.
The
Challenges
Over the years, Tomei’s business has grown from strength to strength with an increasing number of branches nationwide. However, the COVID-19 crisis has necessitated a shift in their sales and marketing activities towards embracing social media and e-commerce as effective tools to engage customers in order to remain relevant and thrive as a brand.
As a result, their IT team faced an increasing demand for stable and high-bandwidth connectivity from the retail outlets. IT support and maintenance became more challenging. The existing network infrastructure at that time reached its limits and was not robust enough to handle the increased demand, coupled with end-of-life equipment, which made it more expensive to run.
These abrupt shifts exacerbated the need for a high-performance network that could support its long-term goals of having high availability, lowering network management and maintenance costs, and eliminating network outages.
Hence, the decision was made for a total tech refresh, which involved implementing a re-architecture of the company’s WAN and moving to enterprise-grade SD WAN from its current traditional IP-VPN.
Key
Issues
Insufficient bandwidth
- Most of the branches were provisioned with a low-speed ADSL connection, which was unable to support the demand of growing social media activities, e.g. Facebook Live.
Link instability
- A best-effort ADSL and Broadband connection at times caused downtime, disruption of marketing activities, high latency and stores going offline.
Without backup connection
- Having only a single internet line with no redundancy impacted the business during internet outages.
Heavy internet-bound traffic
- Inability to offload internet-bound traffic from retail outlets due to bandwidth-hungry applications such as online streaming using social media platforms. Thus, retail outlets faced the issue of poor user experience when streaming is interrupted.
Key
Issues
The
Solution
REDtone SD-WAN:
Future-Proofing the Network
Architecture
The deployment was planned and carried out in phases (by store locations nationwide) together with Tomei’s IT personnel to ensure a smooth migration to the new setup. REDtone’s network operation team monitored the performance closely with the field engineer to ensure improved throughput, traffic stability and uptime. REDtone SD-WAN’s traffic conditioning features addressed issues related to packet loss and flappy links.
With the completion schedule agreed by both parties, Tomei’s WAN infrastructure was fully migrated to SD-WAN. Not only is this a testament to Tomei’s dedication to transforming their network, but also to REDtone’s agile and successful deployment for all the retail outlets.
Liong, Chief Technology Officer (Tomei Group)
“Appointing our long-term telecommunications provider REDtone to introduce SD-WAN to our business is an important milestone in our business digital transformation journey. We have been impressed with the team’s flexibility, know-how and reliability in deploying the exact solution we were looking for. It’s been great working together with REDtone to evolve our legacy WAN to a high-performance network that meets our changing business needs.”
The
Results
High bandwidth
- The SD-WAN was deployed in stages by store locations. Primary lines up to 100Mbps broadband speed were deployed at each branch to replace the traditional ADSL connection. This allowed the branches to carry out marketing activities like Facebook Live smoothly, without the need to worry about intermittence and drop order issues.
- REDtone SD-WAN provides a seamless link failover to 4G mobile broadband when the primary link loses connection, significantly improving site reliability and availability.
- Dynamic networks can respond intelligently to traffic flows, devices used, critical applications and data consumption. This also allows for optimal application management and performance.
- Wi-Fi at all retail outlets are fully managed by REDtone. A cloud-based centralised WLAN monitoring dashboard provides deep visibility of the entire WLAN infrastructure as well as application-level and user-level control. It is highly secure and has dynamic scalability, ensuring an unprecedented level of visibility and control over the entire network.
Up to 100x increase
in bandwidth Mbps.
Service availability improved significantly with backup line using 4G mobile broadband.
Simplified branch architecture with secure SD-WAN and integrated NAC, WLAN, LAN and LTE/4G/5G.
Massive reduction in error rates due to human factors.
The robustness and flexibility of the infrastructure meet the needs of the implementation of Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
Improved user experience on Facebook live-streaming activities
Using application-aware routing where it provides local internet breakouts and offloads HQ’s internet-bound traffic from the retail outlets, routing it directly to the internet via a local internet service provider.
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