Reynolds – Food Service with Wireless Warehouse Upgrade.

For a company to survive and thrive over eight decades, as Reynolds has, it needs to keep finding new ways to do things better. IT plays a major role. Innovators by nature, Reynolds have embraced technology, expediting the flow of goods through the National Distribution Centre by digitising processes and systems. When the family adopted wireless technology, it lifted efficiency at the flagship warehouse to new heights. But excellence is not a fixed point. When the original wireless network started to tire, the IT department decided to act fast and upgrade to the best in modern technology.

There was a further reason why upgrading to new Aruba APs made good business sense. Staff at the NDC use handheld computers and scanners by Zebra Technologies. Long-term partners, Aruba and Zebra have developed technical integrations and troubleshooting innovations that transform device performance. The Aruba UXI agent for Zebra is particularly helpful in reducing helpdesk tickets, cutting downtime and identifying the root causes of network issues. The Aruba UXI agent uses 802.11mc to pinpoint the precise location of any device issue and highlights it on the warehouse floor plan. Even when Zebra devices are in standby mode the UXI agent keeps checking network and application performance with low impact synthetic testing. Thanks to the intuitive UXI dashboard, the Reynolds IT team can see in one glance how each device in the NDC is working

By increasing the resilience of individual APs, unshackling the warehouse from the old on-premise controller and moving functions to the cloud, Reynolds’ new wireless network frees up IT resources like never before. The powerful Aruba Central management platform underpins everything. A cloud-based networking solution with AI-powered insights, Aruba Central automates troubleshooting, workflows and security to keep business running at peak levels. Janko and his team are constantly on the move between the NDC and the nine other Reynolds depots - now they can manage the NDC network on the go, through a single pane of glass. Having trialled Aruba Central at the outset of the project, Janko was impressed by how it had already evolved within a few months. With a little training from Qolcom engineers, his team quickly mastered the intuitive dashboard and hit the ground running.