Medline

Client

Medline is a manufacturer and distributor of surgical and medical products to health institutions and retail markets. The company has been supplying healthcare providers and end users with quality medical products for over 100 years, improving patient care and enhancing the quality of people’s lives. The company is one of the largest privately held manufacturers in health care products in the world, and has been operating in Australia since 2011. In Australia and New Zealand, Medline counts 3000 products provided to serve medical, acute care, and aged care facilities.

Opportunity

Medline’s operations in Australia have seen substantial growth over the last few years. To ensure the company could continue to operate efficiently, a new purpose-built headquarters including warehousing was erected. This new facility supports the company expansion plans and helps them better service their clients into the future. To lead their industry with the most cost-effective products, Medline focuses on improving quality and effectiveness in every area of operations, including IT. As introduction of automation technologies to further augment efficiency is potentially on the horizon, ensuring the underlying network is capable of handling future automation, IoT sensors, and a multitude of connected devices is paramount.

Medline chose Outcomex as their trusted advisor to design and implement their Unified Communications platform and assist with the high level architectural approach to the new network, security, and wireless infrastructure. The company’s previous voice environment was coming to End-of-Life and would soon become unsupported. The new Unified Communication solution had to cater for the consolidation of its headquarters and warehousing, counting 250 employees, as well as for its future growth of up to 500 staff. Medline required a platform that would provide the foundation for next generation voice/video, and contact centre solutions to improve staff productivity and collaboration internally and externally.

Solution

Outcomex implemented a Cisco Unified Communication solution, Business Edition 6000 (BE6000), to the Medline environment; providing a new platform that would enable local voice redundancy. The BE6000 platform has all the features Medline required; premium voice, video, messaging, instant messaging and presence, conferencing, video conferencing, contact centre services, mobility capabilities, and more. As the company continues to grow, the solution gives them the ability to deliver premium collaborative services with the capacity to support up to 1000 users, 2500 devices and 100 contact centre agents.

Outcomex also assisted Medline with the design of a new network, security, and wireless architecture within their headquarters and warehouse environments. This infrastructure refresh included elements such as:

• • Catalyst switching with Cisco One software

providing additional value with Identity Services Engine (ISE), Prime Infrastructure, Stealthwatch and with state of the art location analytics that can be turned on in the future;

• • ASA 5525-X Adaptive Security Appliance

delivering secure access within the site as well as next generation security features such as Firepower, IPS, and AMP, ensuring Medline is kept safe from the latest advanced threats;

• • 2802 Access Points

connected back to dual Cisco Wireless LAN Controllers for a robust and scalable wireless solution.

These technologies are designed to support Medline’s activities into the future; ensuring the network performs as a true foundation for the business by being able to provide next generation services to its end users and customers in a flexible, and secure approach.

Impact

By leveraging Outcomex’s extensive engineering and project management capabilities, Medline seamlessly migrated existing users from the current Cisco Call Manager to the Business Edition platform. Outcomex’s phased approach to the migration mitigated risks and ensured users and operations experienced no impact during the transition to the new voice infrastructure.

The comprehensive functionalities within their new Contact Centre gave Medline access to real-time metrics and quality assurance capabilities; leading to monitoring and intelligently managing the customer queries coming through. Priding itself on its strong customer service, Medline has already reported substantial increase in customer satisfaction by ensuring clients are serviced with maximum efficiency utilising the platform to its full potential.

Supporting the voice infrastructure is the underlying network architected by Outcomex. The network refresh has prepared Medline for future growth both across wired and wireless devices with the capability to integrate smart warehousing in the future, while being secure, robust, and resilient.