Pharmacy H43739 HR

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Case Study

Pharmacies Improve Network Operations

and Customer Satisfaction

Today’s pharmacies offer an abundant array of medical

and healthcare products, personal care items, household

products, and photo processing services. Most drugstore

chains also have online stores, and some even house

medical clinics to treat common illnesses and minor

injuries. In order to provide the best customer service,

pharmacy retailers need a robust network that can support

fast and secure credit card transactions, efficient back

office systems, and today’s high-bandwidth applications.

In this competitive field, downtime is not an option. Here

are just some of the ways that Hughes Managed Network

Services have helped leading pharmacy chains serve their

customers better.

High Availability Network Enhances the Customer

Experience

One of the nation’s top drugstore chains found that it was

outgrowing its communications system. Bandwidth-hungry

applications such as photo processing, videoconferencing,

and third-party loyalty marketing programs were swamping

the chain’s network capacity across its retail operations—

not to mention making it a struggle to provide suitable

backup for each store. It was time for a new network design.

In addition to solving the bandwidth challenge, the retailer

wanted a network that would ensure that security policies

were tightly controlled while providing flexible, dynamic

allocation of available bandwidth. The company needed

to meet tough security regulations and protect its private

network while enabling third-party applications to run over

the same physical network.

Pulling It Together with a High Availability Network

Enter Hughes High Availability Network, a fully-managed

service that enables the retailer to easily handle its growing

communications requirements. Hughes High-Availability

VPN combines the best of wireline, wireless and satellite

technologies to deliver an integrated, fully-managed network

with unmatched reliability and performance. The two

co-primary, always-on, diverse broadband connections to

each pharmacy ensure the best application performance

possible and that their mission-critical applications will

continue to be available, even if one of the broadband

connections is disrupted.

Today, the retailer’s new High Availability Network delivers

better performance and higher availability, and enables

more advanced applications at its nearly 5,000 retail

locations. The managed network integrates a variety of high-

speed wireline technologies (T1, cable, DSL) with Hughes

broadband satellite technology to support critical store

systems, while also providing reliable, redundant backup

protection so that no store suffers downtime.

Although the retailer contacted several vendors, Hughes

was the only supplier that had the ability to tailor the

network with the best broadband technology suited to each

site, as well as provide affordable backup redundancy. In

addition, Hughes met the retailer’s security requirements

while reducing its operating costs and improving the way

the entire network is managed. Hughes is also embedding

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H43739

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Case Study

features such as WAN acceleration, data compression,

and policy-based routing to further boost broadband

performance.

A New Shopping Experience

Today, the pharmacy retailer is using its Hughes High

Availability Network not only to handle its mission-critical

applications and processes—including superb prescription

and photo processing services—but also to enhance the

customer shopping experience. The flexible, highly available

solution enables new interactive shopping capabilities,

easier access to product information, more efficient

prescription ordering, and the ability to take advantage of

in-store and partner promotions—creating a smart drugstore

model that caters to the needs of today’s savvy customer.

Meeting Burgeoning Pharmacy and Photo Service

Demands

Meanwhile, another large pharmacy retailer needed to

improve its network backup and upgrade its network to

deliver rapid, reliable prescriptions and photo services to

its customers. The MPLS solution that had initially met the

retailer’s networking needs was creating new challenges in

bandwidth, cost, and network backup, particularly as new

applications were brought online.

The retailer’s pharmacy application, for example, required

nearly 100 percent uptime and robust backup to reliably

fill customer prescriptions. In addition, a new digital photo

development application would require MPLS bandwidth

expansion at considerable cost.

Internal studies indicated that each location would need at

least 384 kbps to handle the new photo application.

That kind of cost increase multiplied across thousands of

stores was a budget showstopper. Furthermore, it wouldn’t

resolve the backup challenges.

Availability, Flexibility, Resiliency

The retailer turned to Hughes Access Continuity to solve

both its pharmacy backup and photo bandwidth challenges.

Hughes Access Continuity is a fully-managed, secure,

diverse wireless (3G or satellite) backup solution that

completely bypasses primary landline connections and

protects businesses from costly network outages.

Today, the retailer’s Access Continuity network service

complements its existing MPLS network with broadband

satellite technology, resulting in near 100 percent store/

pharmacy availability. And the increased network bandwidth

eliminated the need to upgrade the MPLS network. As a

result, the retailer now enjoys enhanced performance and

higher availability employing a dual path, route-diverse

WAN—all while lowering overall networking costs.

In particular, the upgraded dual path WAN configuration

provides extreme flexibility and resiliency for the company’s

photo and pharmacy applications. This “network within

a network” architecture delivers optimized performance

while delivering the utmost in network availability. Using

automatic failover, selected applications are dynamically re-

routed to utilize the alternate transport. Using policy-based

routing, the company is also able to prioritize pharmacy

applications, allocating the necessary bandwidth for

mission-critical applications, as well as leveraging backup

capacity for lower-priority applications.

Getting an Edge on the Competition

Today, with the powerful capabilities of its Hughes

Access Continuity service, the pharmacy retailer offers

customers some of the most advanced pharmacy and

photo development services in the country and has the

required infrastructure to make sure it can satisfy customer

prescriptions 24/7. With its Hughes Access Continuity

Solution, the retailer enjoys enterprise-grade performance,

availability, and reliability—delivering the edge it needs to

stay ahead of the competition.