About The Boyd Group
In 1990, The Boyd Group opened its first autobody collision repair facility in Canada and is the largest operator of collision repair centers in North America, with over 3,000 employees and more than 250 locations.
With annual sales of over $430M, the company has grown through acquisition and looks to continue to expand its growth strategy in years to come.
Challenges
While the Boyd Group had Wi-Fi access at some of its locations previously, there was not a unified wireless solution across the entire company. Retail locations wanted to offer a guest network in its waiting rooms, as well as provide a captive portal page for greater advertising and marketing opportunities.
The Boyd Group wanted to switch to wireless devices for its daily operations, making a unified enterprise-class Wi-Fi network a more urgent requirement across all retail locations.
With locations across a large span of territory in North America, and with a small IT team, the company needed centralized remote management without controllers and a solution that could easily scale.
The Solution
Aerohive AP350 access points are deployed in each retail location, with over 660 APs currently implemented in the collision shops. Although all operations were not yet wireless, the Boyd Group replaced what Cisco equipment it did have with Aerohive solutions. Without a need for controllers, it was much simpler for the company to roll out a wireless network across its entire operations, even deploying in less than four months from the start of the initial evaluation.
Aerohive APs are also deployed at its headquarters location in Canada, providing Wi-Fi for executives, the accounting team, and employees operating mobile devices. HiveManager Online is used for all network management and control, giving flexibility to the IT teams based both in the US and Canada.
The Boyd Group has set up a guest network at each retail location. The company is utilizing guest-specific SSIDs and the captive web portal to manage guest access. The company is also evaluating Aerohive BR100 and BR200 branch routers for use exclusively at new facilities to allow access right away to the corporate network.
The Results
When a typical customer now comes to a Boyd Group location, a technician can go out to the vehicle, input information and photos through a wireless device using software and applications that are directly uploaded to the corporate network for estimating procedures.
One particular area of greater efficiency and accuracy is with paint operations for the company. Now, thin clients are used to connect wirelessly to corporate management software to enter vehicle information, photos, and enter data for necessary paint and body work that communicates directly with the paint instruments.
Customers can now connect to Wi-Fi through the guest network while they wait. The Boyd Group will soon take advantage of more Aerohive features to block content and capture customer data for marketing programs.
From its corporate board rooms, to its parking lots and customer waiting rooms, the Boyd Group has deployed a unified wireless network to enable greater efficiency for both employees and customers.
To learn more, read the full case study here.