ABC Fine Wines and Spirits

The Company:

ABC Fine Wine & Spirits is the country's largest privately owned fine wine and spirits merchant, with approximately one hundred and fifty stores (from Tallahassee to Miami) and fifteen hundred employees. Company headquarters are in Orlando, with executive offices adjacent to a 150,000 square foot distribution center. The distribution center features temperature-controlled wine storage, two humidors, temperature-controlled cigarette storage, and a fleet of refrigerated trucks to ensure that temperature-sensitive products such as wine and tobacco are not subjected to the extremes of Florida temperature. 

New stores average 10,000 square feet in size. These often include walk-in cigar humidors, temperature-controlled wine cellars, and massive cold space for imported and micro brewed beers. Some locations also feature a temperature controlled wine vault where customers store their wine and keep the key. ABC carries more than four thousand fine wines, a selection of more than four hundred cigars, and both rare and popular spirits. Our larger stores also offer a variety of gourmet foods, custom gift baskets and gift wrapping.

The Problem:

ABC Fine Wine & Spirits has a tremendous inventory management challenge.  With a growing number of stores and number of items (SKUs) per store, more automation was required to keep track of the inventory both in the stores and in the central distribution warehouse.  Real-time systems were needed to reduce improve operational efficiency, reduce loss and shrinkage, provide supply chain visibility, and enable the company to continue to scale adding new stores almost every year.  To make things more challenging ABC FWS was faced with meeting PCI compliance requirements.

The Solution:

With the help of VPN Systems, ABC FWS designed and implemented a robust and secure Cisco 802.11a/b/g wireless network for the main distribution warehouse, headquarters, and all one hundred and fifty stores. The WLAN platform was the Cisco 4400 series WLAN Controller and the AP1242AG LWAP (Light Weight Access Point).  
 

The WLAN was designed to support more than four hundred Symbol Technologies wireless mobile bar code scanners, as well as laptops, and peripherals such as bar code label printers. VPN Systems was responsible for the physical and logical design of the Wireless LAN, as well as the integration with the wired LAN and the authentication and security strategy. VPN Systems additionally provisioned all four hundred and eleven Symbol wireless mobile scanners, providing a cold-boot persistent production image that made the units easier to manage and reduced the need for IT staff to re-configure each device when it had gone in for service, or had been without it's battery for too long.

The Outcome:

ABC FWS relies heavily on it's Cisco Wireless LAN and the Symbol Mobile Scanning computers they use for real-time inventory management.  The services the VPN Systems provided to design, configure and implement these systems have ensured reliability, performance, security, and the ability to grow with the business requirements.  Let us put you in touch with the folks at ABC FWS so they can share their personal experience working with VPN Systems.