Company Profile

Orscheln Farm & Home is a Midwest-based retailer with over 160 locations across nine states, supplying rural American families with products to live, enjoy and thrive in the outdoor, farm, ranch and rural lifestyle. With over 50 years of experience, Orscheln is the hometown store for merchandise with rugged quality and exceptional value.

Farm Retailer Moves to a High-Speed Fixed Wireless Broadband Network
Farm Retailer Moves to a High-Speed Fixed Wireless Broadband Network
Farm Retailer Moves to a High-Speed Fixed Wireless Broadband Network
Farm Retailer Moves to a High-Speed Fixed Wireless Broadband Network

Challenge

Orscheln’s management team wanted to provide their stores with a standardized private, high-speed network across their hundred plus locations across nine states.

Streamlining routing, security, bandwidth, and support through provider consolidation was a priority – preventing their internal help desk from managing a piecemeal of carrier partners.

Many Orscheln locations often serve communities with limited broadband or connectivity, making operations challenging as technology has advanced.

To remain competitive, Orscheln has actively sought alternatives to expensive T1 circuits, as well as ways to combine support, monitoring, and billing – all with the end-goal of streamlining network communications into a turnkey solution. Stores utilized multiple providers, a variety of circuit types and in some cases dial-up services for POS transactions. Throughout the years, finding adequate solutions for reliable, fast broadband in rural areas has been challenging or impossible. Traditional broadband options such as DSL have had service issues while providing limited bandwidth.

Solution

Bluewave began working with Orscheln to deliver high availability, business grade wireless services to deliver fixed wireless broadband services for store connectivity for applications such as POS, nightly file transfers, and email communications.

During Phase II of the project, Bluewave assisted with adding DSL, cable, and managed network and security services to augment the existing bandwidth.

As applications became more mission-critical to business success, Bluewave worked with multiple providers to consolidate into two partners to deliver both primary managed broadband and a diverse, wireless LTE backup provider.

Bluewave was also able to source a consolidated provider and invoice across all locations for local voice lines – providing Orscheln with $60,000 in annual savings.

In addition, Bluewave secured Orscheln with a premier service provider for support, billing and guaranteed rates that are locked in for the contract term, as opposed to the annually increasing rates they previously saw.

Most recently, Bluewave introduced Orscheln Farm & Home to a business-grade, managed, fixed wireless LTE provider that offers service through all three major wireless carriers and provides Service Level Guarantees (SLAs) on quality and reliability – providing Orscheln with an invaluable “backup” for when traditional broadband fails, or as a backup to the primary network circuit.

Due to the quick installation timelines, wireless LTE has proven to be an excellent, go-to service for Grand Opening locations or to bring a store back online after a primary network failure.

Results

Working closely with the Orscheln team for nearly a decade, Bluewave provides account management, project management, trouble ticket monitoring, and escalations services – allowing Orscheln to operate more efficiently while leveraging their scale to obtain the most cost-effective services.

Driven by customer satisfaction, Bluewave continually strives to keep Orscheln apprised of network and security advancements while ensuring all carrier partners are delivering on their commitment.

By keeping the stores connected, continually looking for cost savings, and helping manage Orscheln’s vendors, Bluewave handles the burden of managing multiple vendors so that Orscheln’s team can concentrate on servicing the store and delivering great internal support.

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