Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Cedarlane Natural Foods Serves Up Extricom Wi-Fi

Cedarlane Natural Foods Serves Up Extricom Wi-Fi

Cedarlane Natural Foods has completed deployment of an Extricom WLAN in its multi-building distribution warehouse system. The WLAN will streamline Cedarlane’s day-to-day operations while achieving operational cost-savings.

New York, NY (PRWEB) May 19, 2010

Extricom, a designer and manufacturer of high-performance, next generation wireless LAN (WLAN) infrastructure solutions, today announced that Cedarlane Natural Foods Inc., a leading manufacturer of award-winning healthy and innovative frozen and fresh foods headquartered in Carson, CA, has finished deploying an Extricom WLAN in its multi-building distribution warehouse system. The WLAN will support wireless scanning terminals and a VoIP phone system, and is designed to streamline Cedarlane’s day-to-day operations while achieving operational cost-savings.

Cedarlane produces and distributes a variety of natural and organic foods to a wide range of retailers and grocery chains, including Krogers, Albertsons, and Vons. The smooth flow of ingredients and operations is key to Cedarlane’s business, so uninterrupted communication and near real-time picture of inventory levels in warehouses are absolutely critical. Cedarlane uses wireless scanners to keep track of inventory over multiple warehouses and is in the process of implementing a wireless VoIP phone system to enhance communications between employees.

“Our warehouses were less than ideal for enterprise-grade Wi-Fi,” stated Daniel Baroco, Cedarlane’s IT Manager. “Cedarlane employees move around a lot both inside our facilities and between buildings, so we needed a wireless solution that handled mobility, as well as the challenging RF environment of the warehouse, without problems. Extricom was the only solution that fit the bill in terms of the performance and operational flexibility to support our sophisticated application base. In addition to allowing us to track inventory, we anticipate it will help us eliminate use of cellular phones as employee communication devices, a potential cost-savings of $100,000 per year.”

Extricom Channel Blanket™ architecture was designed with mobility as a core value, making it ideally suited for the warehouse environment. An Extricom system consists of multiple APs operating on the same channel to create widespread, contiguous blankets of coverage, and a central Extricom switch coordinates AP transmissions to ensure that there is no co-channel interference. The result is wire-like connectivity with no handoffs between APs as wireless clients move around. In addition, multiple Channel Blankets can be layered on the same physical infrastructure, which allows applications with possibly conflicting network needs, such as VoIP and data, to be segregated onto separate blankets.

“Deployments like Cedarlane Natural Foods are a great showcase for how Extricom WLAN helps enterprises overcome technical challenges that other wireless solutions can’t resolve,” declared Gideon Rottem, Extricom’s CEO. “As more and more enterprises look to go beyond the wireless ‘hotspot’ and make their WLAN a critical part of the business, operational flexibility, seamless mobility, and guaranteed performance will be at a premium. The multi-purpose nature of the Extricom WLAN makes it the perfect system to leverage these values and achieve substantial ROI.”

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