Network Upgrade Speeds Customer Service, Store Communication Written by Julie Ritzer Ross Integrated Solutions for Retailers July 2005

Books-A-Million is the third-largest book retailer in the United States, with 207 stores in 19 states and the District of Columbia. In addition to Books-A-Million book superstores, the retailer operates smaller Books & Company independent-style book stores, Bookland mall stores, and Joe Muggs newsstand/cafes, as well as an online bookstore at www.booksamillion.com. The company also has a Web-based customer special order system that runs on its e-commerce platform.

The retailer was using a 56K frame relay network that linked its stores, warehouse, and corporate headquarters. "At the time, this network was not only economical, but it had plenty of bandwidth to handle all the basics, such as credit and gift card processing, POS system polling, and a global customer lookup system," says Cy Fenton, executive vice president of Books-A-Million's NetCentral subsidiary. However, problems arose when additional services were added, including a Web-based intranet, a Web-based hiring solution, the customer special order system, and corporate e-mail.

"Communications became very slow, decreasing customer service levels and increasing customer wait time," Fenton says. "Most customers are accustomed to having DSL [digital subscriber line] speed at home. We wanted to replicate the experience in our stores and solve all our other issues, so we started looking into alternative networks."

To ensure continued security, Books-A-Million wanted to keep the private network. Increasing the bandwidth of its frame relay to 256K would have entailed a major investment in hardware and a four- to five-fold increase in network operating costs, which weren't options. "We looked at installing business-grade DSL lines, putting a VPN [virtual private network] hardware device in the stores, and tunneling store traffic over the Internet back to our corporate network," Fenton recalls. "But, we wanted a private network. VPN wasn't the answer."

Books-A-Million instead chose Cybera's SmartNetwork fully managed, broadband private networking solution. Its heterogeneous network architecture would enable any form of broadband access, depending on the location of the store, to be integrated into a single secure data network. Plus, the solution never touches the public Internet, thereby providing greater security, better performance, and enhanced reliability compared to VPNs.

Faster Network Speeds Customer Service, Corporate Communication
"Essentially, we got a network that acts like a frame relay network, but with the pricing benefits of DSL," Fenton continues. "The vendor worked out a deal to minimize our hardware expenses to approximately a 10% increase. Our network bandwidth was increased to a minimum of 128K, but in many locations, it's 256K - for almost the same price as the 56K frame relay network."

Each Books-A-Million store has a router that connects all POS hardware and peripherals. Data moves over dedicated lines to Cybera's data center in Atlanta, where it is aggregated into a single stream and transmitted to corporate headquarters. At corporate headquarters, an ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) circuit feeds data to the existing frame relay network. Information moves out to the warehouse, the stores, and the corporate intranet securely at a high speed.

On average, the solution yields Books-A-Million five times the bandwidth of its previous network configuration, reducing the amount of time customers have to wait for information or to complete transactions. "Customer service is the number-one benefit; we can quickly look things up," Fenton says. "Corporate communication is also much faster. In the past, it could take three weeks for paper documents to move from headquarters to stores; now we just post information on the intranet and we're done."

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