Secure and Reliable Branch Connectivity to Head Office

About Rohan Designs

Rohan Designs are innovative suppliers of high-quality clothing designed to keep people protected and comfortable in the world’s wildest places. The range includes clothing, boots/shoes, luggage and watches all of which are designed and sold under the Rohan brand.

With the head office in Milton Keynes, Rohan supply their products through a chain of 60 stores in prime UK locations and via a thriving online/mail order business.

“We needed a solid reliable broadband router to support the roll out of our real time stock and sales system to the branches. We’ve been delighted with DrayTek ”

Mark Willison – IT Director, Rohan Designs

The Requirement

Rohan Designs sell high value items through their stores making stock holding and stock replenishment a key factor in their business. Too much stock in a branch is bad for cash flow, too little and a sale may be lost. With the implementation of a new real time sales and stock system the initial requirement was to connect all of the branches reliably and securely such that stock levels and sales trends could be tracked throughout the day.

In the store, the managers need to use the web to access partner sites to assist with specific customer enquiries and to improve the general shopping experience.

100% up time and network reliability was a key requirement as ePos transactions rely on a constant network connection and at busy times such as Sale weeks a high-speed consistent link is essential for managing the real time monitoring of stock.

Rohan are growing as a company and as they grow are opening up new shops. In order to expedite this Rohan wanted a solution that could be up and running before the broadband fixed line was commissioned.

Finally, as Rohan were working within tight budgets it was important that the solution offers great value for money.

• Connecting branches to head office reliably
• Ensuring each connection is highly secure
• Shop to be up and running prior to the provisioning of a fixed broadband circuit
• Great value for money 

The Solution

Rohan selected DrayTek’s Vigor 2830, a dual WAN port router with a firewall capable of 50Mbps throughput. This has all the performance needed for the ADSL2+ circuits installed and the extra port could be put into use in the future for a secondary line or change to a cable broadband service.

The Vigor 2830 has been critically acclaimed winning numerous awards for features and reliability including Pc Pro’s service and reliability award in 2011 making it a low risk option for the business.

One of the useful features identified by Rohan is the ability to connect a 3G dongle to the USB port on the router. This offers a simple and effective way of gaining broadband connectivity straight away wherever there’s a 3G signal. This has been key in helping the company meet their new shop provision deadlines. This feature is also very useful in the event of a sudden network failure; a 3G dongle can be quickly attached to the router and service is back up and running, POS transactions take place and trading continues.

The network has now been in place for some months and has delivered the reliability and flexibility required by Rohan.