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Company Profile ARE Limited is one of the country's leading distributors of automotive components and accessories, supplying a geographical area including South London, Surrey, Hampshire, West Sussex and Berkshire. The company currently employs 250 people and has a delivery fleet of 114 vehicles covering some 2,080,000 miles annually, distributing some 2.4 million parts annually. The Head Office and Distribution network at Farnham totals some 34,000 square feet of storage space and a 4,500 square foot office facility. Our 13 regional branches provide fast delivery of parts to their local areas, supported by regular parts re-distribution between branches. ARE Limited is the only Independent Motor Factor to win the highly prestigious ADF Motor Factor of the Year Award three times. IT Department & the Challenge! AREs systems are based around a Unix based parts distribution system housed in our Farnham head-office to which every branch can log into for review parts holding, catalogue information and POS functions. The system provides POS invoicing, purchasing, sales and purchase ledgers, electronic cataloguing and, more recently, a direct catalogue link from a vehicles UK registration number to its exact model details and hence to parts requirements. ARE traditionally ran its branches over low bandwidth leased BT-kilostream circuits from the Farnham head-office the costs of which were becoming prohibitive. Amcomp had previously looked after all AREs communication needs due to their long association and deep knowledge of the automotive aftermarket and they suggested looking at enhancing the speed and dramatically reducing the costs of these links through the use of broadband connections. According to Andrew East, Managing Director of ARE Our main concern was the lack of a Service Level Agreement on the line component. However, Amcomp went away and came back with a customised solution on top of Smoothwall, enabling easy backup connectivity in the event of ADSL failure. In the case of branches, this is over basic modems to the PSTN and in the case of the central head-office hub, dual-channel ISDN. The solution ARE already had a centralised Internet access capability via an Amcomp provided Linux server using a single dialup modem. The costs and slowness of this service easily justified upgrading this to a broadband connection, via a Smoothwall Corporate Server, to provide proxy and firewalling capabilities. Initial testing was organised by Nick Green, ARE Operations Manager, and, after approval, final implementation around all 13 branches by Fred Hooper, Operations Director. The test went well Nick Green We tested a single branch in Godalming over a VPN via a modem dialup connection for a month and were unable to observe a significant difference compared to the branches' existing 19200 BT-kilostream circuit.. Fred Hooper, Operations Director, managed the installation of ADSL circuits and standard phone lines for backup purposes in all the branches We now have all our locations and several homeworkers linked via VPNs over ADSL to our head-office and are starting to realise what other applications become viable given the increased bandwidth remote control maintenance of our remote PCs, IP telephony for free calls between branches, and the option of giving customers a login to query our parts catalogue and to place online orders all without banks of modems and the costs of phone line rentals. To Conclude Nick Green Operations Manager The new network seems very stable and we have only had a couple of short-term outages in 4 months requiring us to switch over individual connections from ADSL to dialup. Amcomp manage our network and monitor the status of all connections 24/7 In fact, when a processor fan decided to jump off from a processor within our central head-office Smoothwall, they were on the phone to notify us of the problem at 9pm one evening and on-site to fix the fault before our branches opened the next morning! Fred Hooper Operations Director with the added benefit that we save about £26,000 per year and increase line speed a no-brainer. |
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