Trek Bicycles Australia, distributor of US-manufactured Trek bicycles, has deployed a Cisco Unified Communications solution to link its multiple locations, and improve logistics management, communications and customer service.
Trek Bicycles Australia, a wholesale business, grew out of a long-established Sydney bicycle retail business called Clarence Street Cyclery. Trek Bicycles Australia owns the distribution rights for US-made Trek bicycles and today sells more than 200 models and eight brands of bicycles, clothing and accessories to a network of 140 retail outlets nationally.
“Under the old system, orders were sent from the city office to the suburban Trek warehouse by using a dial-up modem to connect to a remote printer. The hardcopy orders were then picked up and fulfilled by warehouse staff. Inventory management and invoicing were separate, largely manual processes,” says David Cook, business development manager of Trek Bicycles Australia.
“When we decided to physically separate our Trek wholesale operations from our Clarence Street Cyclery retail business, it was a great opportunity to revamp our technology strategy and ‘future proof’ both companies by choosing an easily expandable, converged voice and data communications solution.”
To achieve this improvement, Trek chose Cisco Advanced Unified Communications Specialist IMC Communications to help the company link the two locations. The solution at Trek Bicycles Australia consists of Cisco 2800 Series Integrated Services Routers at each site, a wireless network, including three Cisco Aironet 1250 wireless access points at the 1200 square metre warehouse, and Cisco 7920 Wireless IP phones and Cisco 7960G Unified IP phones at the sites.
“This solution is real world proof that it can be done. Trek have been able to both extract greater productivity out of their Cisco infrastructure investment by combining LAN, wireless LAN, WAN and Unified Communications while increasing the actual employees productivity and efficiency,” says IMC Technical Services director, Andrew Gifford.
Stocktaking at the warehouse is now managed with wireless PDAs, and staff or visitors such as sales representatives can use wireless-enabled laptop computers anywhere on the site for paperless ordering and administration. Internal or external callers can reach the warehouse staff carrying wireless telephones anywhere on site, any time, and Cisco Unity Express messaging and greeting services ensure that there are no lost customer contacts. Messages can be played back using either the Cisco Unified IP phones, or via email.