Aerohive enterprise Wi-Fi serves up ERP for healthcare provider

Since its foundation in 1932 by Annie & Nestor Schiller, Septodont has developed, manufactured and distributed a wide range of high quality products for dental professionals. A global pharmaceutical company with $200m annual revenues and 1,200 staff, Septodont provides the anaesthetic for half a billion dental injections each year as well as manufacturing a range of surgical, restorative and preventive care products for dental practitioners. Septodont has six manufacturing plants in France, North America and India, and an international distribution network that is dedicated to serving the needs of dental professionals in more than 150 countries.

Challenge
As part of a strategic project to roll out a new global ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system, Septodont was keen to incorporate a robust and reliable business-critical Wi-Fi infrastructure to enable real-time data entry for barcode terminals and readers across the company’s manufacturing and distribution facilities. To stay ahead in the highly competitive pharmaceutical market, access to real-time information and data is crucial in making effective business decisions.

Choosing the right WLAN solution was critical to ensure connectivity between the barcode devices and the ERP system. “Deploying the new ERP system was a strategic decision for us and critical to our continued growth and success in the market,” said Stephane Leuvrey, Corporate IT Director at Septodont.

“Choosing the right WLAN partner to support this decision was imperative and, after a thorough and detailed evaluation process, Aerohive’s solution stood alone as the only technology that could meet our rigorous requirements.”

Solution
Leuvrey and his team, supported by France-based ICT solutions partner Corail Systems, researched the market, before choosing Aerohive as the optimum solution.

Specifically, Aerohive was alone in meeting the highest standards for the following criteria:

• Advanced technical features and its ability to be deployed in a multi-site environment
• Resilience and reliability; no single point of failure
• Excellent pre-sales technical demonstration and support
• Rapid provisioning and deployment times, often taking one engineer just one day to provision in a new site
• Competitive pricing and lower cost of ownership
• Simplicity and usability of HiveManager NMS

Results

“Aerohive’s advanced technical features combined with ease of use management capabilities ensures that we have a technically resilient and reliable infrastructure that can be scaled, configured, provisioned and managed simply and expediently resulting in lower cost of ownership,” commented Leuvrey.

To date Aerohive has been deployed at Septodont sites across France, the UK and at its facility in Ontario, Canada. The remaining sites in Europe and North America will be deployed by the end of 2012. Aerohive’s HiveManager NMS has been deployed at its French headquarters and Canadian facility to provide management capabilities across the entire infrastructure.

Septodont is also using Aerohive’s Wi-Fi solution to provide connectivity to enable its laptop users to gain access to general business applications such as email, Internet and other services.