Tesco Picks Wavelink To Manage Over 5000 Wireless Access Points Across More Than 600 Stores

UK´s leading retailer launches a wireless upgrade with Mobile Manager

Tesco, Britain´s leading retailer, operates over 2,200 stores around the world. A long-time believer in the value of wireless technology, Tesco is rapidly upgrading its stores and distribution centers in the United Kingdom with a new wireless network infrastructure managed by a single, central installation of Wavelink Mobile Manager.

"For us, the key benefits of Wavelink Mobile Manager are the ability to deal with high volume, create a stable environment and then easily detect when an access point has gone wrong," says Glenn Couch, a Tesco Infrastructure Project Manager.

For the past year, Couch has been managing a rapid rollout of Tesco´s new wireless network that currently covers their larger stores in Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The company is now looking at extending service to Tesco outlets in the Republic of Ireland and Central Europe.

"With over 5000 wireless access points and different settings for each store, to preserve the right settings without central management would be a full time job. We wanted to provide our in-store staff with a robust wireless network, but needed to deliver it in a cost-effective way," said Couch.

Major Network Upgrade

Tesco uses wireless LAN technology from a variety of hardware providers to manage inventory and pricing in the stores and to pick and deliver merchandise from its major distribution centers. Some of the network equipment had been in place for over ten years when Tesco decided it was time to upgrade the infrastructure.

"Once we engaged Wavelink, it was a revamp - a re-roll - to the estate, and a conversion to Cisco for the network kit," says Couch, who has shepherded the installation and configuration of the Cisco model 1200 wireless access points in 673 store locations so far.

Tesco retail outlets range from small Express convenience stores to high street Metro and out out-of-town superstores to large Extra hypermarkets, selling an extensive range of food and non-food items including appliances, consumer-electronics and clothing.

With a base catalogue of over 120,000 different stock keeping units, 40,000 of which are available at any given time in the larger Tesco Extra stores, inventory management and pricing are mission critical network applications.

Tesco also invested in new contracts with, Energis, a UK-based telecommunications company, to assure connectivity between the corporate data centre and individual stores. Each store is equipped with redundancy within the RF (radio frequency) setup to assure continuous wireless communication with a variety of hand-held mobile devices on the store floors and back offices.

Couch describes a typical network transaction: "A PDA swipes a bar code on the shelf in one of the stores and the worker clicks a few buttons. The inquiry is filed from RF through the Energis cloud, off to the data center to get a reply from our new midrange Wintel-platform server, or a mainframe. That information then moves back through the Energis cloud to the store LAN, onto the RF and back to the PDA. It´s a long trip, but it happens quite quickly."

Web-Enabled Mobile Devices

"The major thrust of all this was really designed to allow web-enabled devices in stores," says Couch. "There are around 6500 RF-enabled Intermec PDAs at the moment. And we have approximately 4000 Fujitsu tablets that we use for home shopping."

Tesco has become a leader in home shopping over the Internet. Tesco.com the company´s e-commerce business, illustrates how wireless technology is changing the way this growing retailer serves its customers.

"When people place orders over the Internet, those orders are picked in the local Tesco stores and delivered by van," Couch explains. "Internet orders are placed directly onto the store servers. Then every morning at six o´clock, crews download the orders by RF and pick the goods. We even map the store layout to improve the efficiency of the pick-up. All of that work is done with the wireless Fujitsu pads."

Tesco is currently evaluating Wavelink Avalanche software to manage its growing inventory of wireless and mobile devices. In the meantime the company is working closely with Wavelink to custom tailor the use of Mobile Manager.

Future Opportunity

Tesco has invested in a comprehensive IT infrastructure, with wireless in stores, wide area links from Energis and new W-Intel Server farms, in a continuous effort to improve service for its customers. Tesco is also using new belt printers to improve the way in which price reductions are carried out, removing much of the manual work at the checkout. Additionally, the retailer is rolling out hundreds of RF-enabled E-Learning PCs (in-store training materials) and RF-enabled Mobile Checkouts in its ongoing effort to improve the quality of service at Tesco stores.

Management Challenge

"We recognized that dealing with a lot of access points was tricky," says Couch. "We could tell from our previous experience with RF that we needed some kind of central management. We would have mobile units fire requests for data, but an access point would fail to pick it up. Store staff would have to adjust their behavior - congregate over the mushrooms because that was the only access point in the store that worked."

"So we wanted something that would both alert us to failures and manage the configuration; and with upgraded security features, we really needed something that could handle all the various Cisco configuration details," says Couch. "Cisco recommended Wavelink, so we took a good look at what was on offer and found a company with a positive approach to change and a willingness to adopt our suggestions."

Wavelink Solution

Couch was especially attracted to the ability to profile sets of APs allowing Tesco to establish different configuration profiles for different stores. "Wavelink Mobile Manager version 5.4 gave us groupings that make it much easier. We also wanted auto-detection of new devices. If a field engineer swaps-out an access point, Mobile Manager should recognize that a new device has come online, and in future versions, it will automatically profile it. Greater stability is the end result."

"We´ve found that upgrades are much easier with Wavelink," Couch explains. "At one stage we had to configure 900 access points manually and it took us three weeks. We now find it´s more than ten times quicker using Mobile Manager. It gives big labor savings when you´re planning a major change, and also when you´re dealing with support questions."

For Glenn Couch, as Tesco continues to expand with new acquisitions and the wireless infrastructure continues to grow, there´s also a personal benefit from central management, "I can rest easy, to be honest. Once a store is profiled, I´m confident it works."