Paper Plus Group completes technology upgrade

The Paper Plus Group went to market with a Request for Proposal to refresh its hardware and upgrade its network in 2016.

Paper Plus Group chief information officer Mandy Kennedy says the business, which has around 115 stores nationwide, was facing problems with its aged technical infrastructure. Servers were coming to the end of life and their Spark network was being retired.

“The biggest pain point for a lot of store owners was the speed of the network, we were told it was impacting their business,” says Kennedy.

Intellium designed, procured, built and continues to support a private wide area network for the retailer. It also delivered a hardware refresh project, migrating the Paper Plus Group on to new servers, which are located offsite at Intellium’s datacentre.

Mandy Kennedy: Paper Plus is also trialling in store wifi at some sites, following the improved connectivity.

Intellium says the WAN will connect 113 stores from Kerikeri to Invercargill, providing significantly increased connectivity speeds and reliability, as well as the opportunity for remote working.

The Group’s support office has been moved off Gmail and on to Exchange as its email system and users have far richer functionality, including the ability to work from home.

“The speed of the network is vastly improved for all of the stores,” says Kennedy. “The ability to work remotely has improved and our email platform is a lot richer in functionality. This all improves efficiency, which is both saving time in stores and reducing levels of frustration.”

Paper Plus is also trialling in store wifi at some sites, following the improved connectivity.

Mark Taylor, director of business development at Intellium, says by giving the option to replace the existing phone systems with voice over IP, store owners can choose to no longer pay for land lines. He says improved resilience was achieved by cellular failover being incorporated into the design.