The company has retail stores, customer support and sales operations across the country. In 2016 Orro was tasked with upgrading Flight Centre’s network and infrastructure across its numerous businesses including Flight Centre, Escape Travel, Student Flights, Travel Associates and Cruiseabout.
Challenge
As a travel services retailer, Flight Centre’s network system is mission critical for the business. When a customer walks into any of their physical retail environments, real time pricing and availability is fundamental – without it, their value and relevance to customers would dissipate.
Providing such a robust solution can be difficult using a traditional network approach, which may be susceptible to bottlenecks or even failure.
Flight Centre’s ageing network infrastructure however, meant they were finding themselves weighed down from an IT support perspective due to rolling network outages and dropouts. With no backup or redundancy measure in place, shops would periodically be offline, which in turn was having a negative impact on customer experience.
Solution
Working with Flight Centre, the Orro team designed and developed a Cisco Meraki SD-WAN and wireless solution across 1,100+ retail sites nationally. This was, at the time of delivery, the largest project of its kind globally.
The solution included carrier provisioning and network management and offered Flight Centre far greater degrees of control and visibility, by consolidating all carrier and network vendors within one central management platform – One Touch Control (OTC).
With OTC’s highly integrated network management approach, the business could receive real-time status of hardware health and proactive alerts on network performance including utilisation, latency, packet loss and jitter across all network legs.
Outcome
“The overall business has been strengthened by the solution” (Jamie Glenn – Chief Technology Officer, Flight Centre)
Through partnership with Orro, Flight Centre has been able to maintain the high level of customer service for which it is well-known.
The network also improves business capability right across its retail store network and improves visibility of network performance through OTC.
“We set out to deliver control, visibility and capability across our retail store network and we have certainly managed to achieve that with Orro.” (Ben Barnes – Technology Business Support, Flight Centre)
