Project Overview
INDUSTRY
Home Improvement Retailer
PROJECT
Technology update/refresh
SIZE
2,000+ stores and distribution centers
Customer Business Requirements
With a clearly defined set of IT standards around equipment and wiring, plus a retail footprint spread across the U.S. and Canada, this major home improvement retailer needed an IT partner to provide consistent, reliable and responsive support anytime they needed it. They chose Bailiwick® for several reasons, including our ability to promptly handle the 9,000+ annual service calls that go with maintaining cabling and wireless network equipment in two countries across more than 2,000 stores and distribution centers.
Project Services Overview
Hardware Repairs
We support this customer with pre-determined service response times ranging from four to 24 to 48 to 72 hours. The customer depends on us to maintain critical equipment that keeps stores up and running. We also warehouse their decommissioned and new equipment in our main facility, a service that includes real time asset reporting.
Wiring Support and Repairs
Bailiwick is responsible for maintaining cabling for the stores, including voice, data and paging. We coordinate with alarm companies, local telecommunications providers and others to speed resolution of problems and ensure uninterrupted performance.
Wireless Surveys
Our engineers worked closely with the customer to analyze overall wireless performance in a typical store environment and produce a heat map. This in-depth knowledge even takes into account wireless interference from neighboring retailers and has led us to relocate APs and make other adjustments to ensure best results.
Move/Add/Change Work
Our partnership extends to offering a menu of service options ranging from installing new cabling and phone lines to conducting surveys that document wireless conditions in stores. This “a la carte” approach enables stores to choose services that require the most urgent attention.
Program Reporting
Bailiwick’s monthly report to the customer summarizes a wide range of information, from Service Level Agreement compliance to equipment replacement and work requests from individual stores. Over time, the monthly, quarterly and yearly data we supply has proved extremely valuable to the customer in predicting and planning IT budgets and long-range equipment needs.
Summary
As our relationship with this customer has evolved over 10 years, we’ve become a virtual in-house IT department. We’re there when natural disasters occur, wireless issues pop up affecting in-bound and out-bound deliveries in the Distribution Centers and anywhere projects outside our normal scope of work need attention.
This kind of flexible response is typical of our relationship with the customer. In fact, Bailiwick technicians have established relationships with managers at various stores. And always, we approach any service call with one goal in mind: to resolve the issue in one visit.
The Bailiwick Difference
Bailiwick is set up to handle exactly this kind of customer relationship. Our network of technicians stretches across the U.S. and Canada, and our project management team routinely coordinates large scale ongoing projects. This customer also values the trend reports we generate, which help them make informed business decisions and develop maintenance and replacement schedules for their IT equipment and infrastructure. Last, but definitely not least, our engineering staff, entrusted with adhering to the customer’s exacting IT standards, absorbed every detail of their wiring requirements and strictly adhered to those standards.