04 April 2024
Countrywide Healthcare, a 27-year-old supplier of medical and janitorial equipment to the care sector, faced critical network performance challenges in their new warehouse with a Cisco Meraki network. The IT team struggled to gain comprehensive visibility into its performance, resulting in unresolved downtime incidents like the inability to download web orders and slow ERP system performance.
Supporting expansion
“When we moved to our current 110,000 sq. ft warehouse in 2021, the refurbishment included the installation of a full Meraki network. We chose Meraki because we didn’t need to be experts in Cisco networking, since Meraki is almost plug and play with control from anywhere,” said Jonathan Price, IT manager at Countrywide Healthcare.
Since moving to the new premises, Countrywide has expanded to around 300 network clients with more being added all the time, including internal sales and field salespeople. With the expansion, the team soon found they needed a greater understanding of how the network was performing. Its online-business direct to consumers was also growing which meant the IT department was busier than ever.
“We had a couple of incidents where we couldn’t download our web orders,” said Price. “We suspected that we were saturating the bandwidth on our internet connection, but we couldn’t confirm this suspicion. We could see what was happening right now on the Meraki dashboard but there was no accessible historical reporting and no way of knowing if our 3.00am backups were causing the issue. We simply had no visibility, and it took a considerable effort to find out what was going on. It was quite frustrating.”
The IT team knew it needed to monitor internet bandwidth, but also wanted to see the performance of the 40+ WiFi access points installed around the building.
With the warehouse team soon to adopt handheld scanners, the team needed to see both real-time performance information as well as trends and patterns. Further, the warehouse team had complained that the ERP system was slower on the warehouse floor compared to the upstairs offices; it was necessary to check if this was just their perception, or if they were saturating the uplink bandwidth between the warehouse and the core connection. This link between the main office and the warehouse is critical. If it goes down, is saturated or has any issues, it will have an immediate and tangible impact on the business.
A seamless solution
Highlight’s Service Assurance Platform provided the seamless solution required, offering real-time insights and historical reporting, empowering the team to troubleshoot effectively and optimize network performance for uninterrupted operations. Moreover, it was 94% quicker to setup than previous monitoring tools trialled.
“We came across Highlight Service Assurance Platform because our internet service provider, Gamma Telecom, also uses Highlight. The main appeal of Highlight was that it works with Meraki,” said Price. “When we signed up for a free trial, all we had to do was to add our API key to Highlight and it did everything for us. We didn’t have to mess about with it and sink lots of hours into it. It was three clicks maximum, put the API key in, press OK and a couple of minutes later it talked to Meraki and brought across the WiFi access points and firewalls. Highlight did its magic in the background, and it worked. It really was the golden bullet. The switches have since been added, and we can now see the vital uplink metric between the main core network and the warehouse.”
According to Price, all the required information was visible on the dashboard, including number of clients per access point, the internet bandwidth, switch port utilisation and the historical reporting.
“We particularly like Highlight’s critical ports feature on the switches. This enables us to specify our uplink ports so we can keep a close eye on them. For this we have set email alerts to notify us if it goes down at any time,” said Price.
Price reported that Highlight’s solution delivered an 80% reduction in time to identify network issues: “for example, the other morning we received alerts that our back-up system had failed. Our first thought is that we had maxed-out our internet use. We immediately went into Highlight and could see that there was plenty of bandwidth available, the switches weren’t being used too heavily, everything was within expected parameters, so the issue was elsewhere. We can look at Highlight and know within a couple of minutes if it’s the network, if we have done something or if it was an external fault.”
With the ability to review trends and understand increases in internet usage, Highlight is enabling Countrywide to future proof its technology and plan their long-term strategies, such as expanding the warehouse and increasing headcount, which all impacts the network.
