Centralized Accounting & Sales Reporting for Retail

Customer Situation

Star Furniture is one of the largest retailers of fine furniture in Texas. Headquartered in Houston, the company also has major sites in San Antonio and Austin, with a couple of stores in other remote locations. Previously, Star Furniture used a frame relay network to connect its various store locations. This solution provided 128 kbps Committed Information Rate (CIR) and 256 kbps Peak Information Rate (PIR) at the main location.   This bandwidth was insufficient for Star Furniture’s accounting and sales functions.   During the past year, Berkshire Hathaway bought the company. The new management was in a strong position to infuse money into the company and wanted to expand and improve operations among the stores.

Star Furniture has an in-house IT department that maintains its entire telecommunications network.

Customer Needs

The new management’s corporate objectives were to improve market share and develop a strategy for future growth. Star Furniture needed to be able to seamlessly add sites without having to reconfigure its network. In order to meet these goals, the company needed to improve data and information transfer between remote sites and the data center.   It required faster connectivity for real-time accounting and sales transactions. The company’s primary drivers were to add bandwidth and, if possible, reduce costs.

Solution

tw telecom presented the customer with VersiPak Virtually Routed Service (VRS). VersiPak VRS expands Star Furniture’s private IP network, providing a private LAN extension that allows the company to transfer private data between locations. Also, remote sites can send Internet bound traffic across VRS connections, and the hub site transmits this to the Internet.

The hub site was configured with a VersiPak Mach3 solution, including 23 business lines and 3.0 mbps of VRS bandwidth. The majority of remote stores were configured with 10 business lines and 768 kbps of VRS bandwidth.  

The San Antonio and Austin stores were connected to the PPN in Houston, using DASH (Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Houston), a tw telecom optical network.

 Benefits

tw telecom VersiPak VRS solution tripled the bandwidth at the hub site and increased bandwidth at the remote locations more than ten-fold. By including voice and long distance in the solution, Star Furniture was able to cut its overall costs.

Star Furniture’s management likes having a single provider for the entire solution. TWTC provides all communications services, including local and long distance voice, as well as Internet service. They also like VRS’ dynamic bandwidth allocation—when voice channels are not being used, the stranded channels are dynamically allocated to data, giving Star Furniture more data bandwidth.  

The company’s management believes that with VersiPak VRS, they will be able to scale their needs to meet the company’s growth goals.

Diagram