Category: Case Studies

About Cooper Environmental Science

Coopers Environmental Science (Coopers ES) is a pest control company which offers a range of products for the professional pest control industry, the grain storage industry, and is a reseller of pesticides for the home owner. Their approach in designing products is to think of the environment first – which means all their technologies are innovative and fresh introductions to the market; but most importantly, their products are ahead of the game, create healthier environments, and ensure food security.

Industry

Pest control is essential to the protection of the environment as well as public health. According to a story reported by Times Live, the Chinese Pest Control Association believes that a rapidly warming planet‚ increasing pace of urbanisation and booming trade and tourism have led to an increase in disease-carrying organisms. This supports the point that effective pest control is needed to improve the quality of life for people in Southern Africa and the world over.

Challenge

Tienie Jordaan, the Financial Director of Coopers ES, says that the company needed to upgrade and streamline the systems in order to give their client base better service. Their priorities were creating an integrated system, improving service levels and reducing costs, connecting all business units on an online live platform, ensuring system high availability, and IT security to safeguard against cyber-attacks and cyber-insecurities.

Business Solution

The Wide Area Network deployment with dual last mile connectivity, in conjunction with integrated voice services, managed firewall and backups have helped Coopers ES to achieve their cost savings and upgraded ICT requirements. “We have also been able to streamline business practices,” Jordaan says.

Overall experience with Vox

“Vox has impressive service levels –the quality of network performance and after sale backup. From the project management to the relationship with your project manager,” says Jordaan, “We have a one-on-one relationship with Vox, and the relationship manager is efficient – on a monthly basis he contacts us to monitor feedback and reports on our improvements.” This personalised account management made a difference in ensuring that things ran smoothly and that any challenges were dealt with efficiently.

About Company

In2Food is an award-winning food manufacturing company that supplies food products to carefully selected high-end grocery retailers and wholesalers, globally. They make everything from cakes to sauces and are known for being the largest fresh and prepared food supplier for high-end grocery store, Woolworths. In2Food have over 7000 people in their employ working in various office branches and food production facilities around the country.

About Industry

The food manufacturing industry in South Africa is concerned with the production and sale of food in the country. This includes farming, packaging, distribution, marketing and retail of food products.

The Business Challenge

With so many offices and factories in the country, In2Food were working with multiple Internet connections across their branches. Multiple Internet connections meant dealing with multiple service providers.

As a company that relies heavily on outsourcing their services, dealing with so many providers started becoming a headache. “When you have more than one service provider, it becomes a full-time job to manage them all,” says Danie Steyn, In2Food Group IT Manager, “This is not ideal when you have only two internal staff members in your IT team,” he adds.

The need to consolidate their internal Internet network was an apparent one, but so was the need to deal with one provider who the company could rely on for quick responses and turnaround times.

The Business Solution

To consolidate their internal network, In2Food adopted Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) from Vox. This allowed for one Internet connection across all their branches, but also provided the convenience of working with one service provider.

Having only one service provider took a lot of the burden away from the IT team, but it was still not enough for Steyn, who wanted to have a service provider he did not have to manage in any way.

“We decided to take advantage of Vox’s Advanced Service Level Agreement (SLA),” says Steyn. “It was exactly the type of service we were looking for. Vox’s premium SLA team is amazing. They are jacked up in every way and so supportive,” he adds.

Thanks to advanced SLA, Steyn and his team have been able to fully rely on Vox to keep their systems up and running and have enjoyed quick responses whenever the occasional problem has arisen.

Overall experience with Vox

In2Food brag about the service they have received from the Vox Advanced SLA team. “It’s great to have a team we can rely on,” says Steyn. “We always have uptime and can depend on Vox for fast answers to any questions we have about the systems we use,” he adds.

Steyn goes on to note the vast and helpful knowledge of the Vox team and their continual support despite internal change in the company. “Vox’s service is seamless, even when they have had staff turnover, we have never had any balls dropped by them,” says Steyn.

About King Price

King Price Insurance specialises in short term insurance. They have won numerous awards including Fastest Growing Insurance Company in South Africa in 2019 and are known as the only short-term insurer that lowers their insurance premium monthly.

Insurance Industry

Insurance companies hold personal details, financial details and the like, in their care. They deal with a lot of sensitive and private information. It is therefore imperative that these companies have a way to have all this information stored, archived and secured.

The Business Challenge

“Our company has grown by an average of 47% yearly over the last seven years and we are currently the front leader of growth in our industry,” says Sebastian Erasmus, Network and Security Engineer at King Price Insurance. “We wanted a vendor that would grow with us, a company that would help us adopt new products as and when we need them,” he adds.

Not only did King Price Insurance need to store their files safely and securely, and ensure their network is prepared for disaster recovery or network failure, they also needed to keep up with the pace of the insurance industry. Measures to increase efficiency and speed were a necessity.

“We used to back up our documents with hard drives and with another company that stores physical documents,” says Erasmus. “The problem with this method was that our documents would go through a lot of hands, not only posing a security risk, but allowing for many points of failure,” he adds, highlighting that this was not a seamless process.

Along with this, two of King Price’s core IT goals were to migrate to the Cloud and keep their core network at Teraco, building a hybrid cloud. They were looking for a service provider to help them meet these goals.

Aside from this, King Price had another issue they were dealing with. This was with regards to their company mobile SIMs, “We have had some employees abusing the company’s mobile data, but we were unable to control this or create accountability for it,” says Erasmus.

The Business Solution

King Price Insurance was introduced to Vox through Knekt Telecoms, a Vox Business Partner, so they already had Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) lines with Vox.

Vox was also the first company to offer King Price Fortinet, a leading firewall brand, of which Vox are platinum partners.

“The relationship we have with Vox has been nothing short of amazing,” says Erasmus. It’s because of this relationship that King Price found a company that could provide the scalability they were looking for. “Vox has a plethora of products to assist with Cloud migration and their presence at Teraco is also helpful,” says Erasmus.

He adds that migrating to the Cloud has given King Price the control they need to store their data on premise. “We are also set up for disaster recovery thanks to the network redundancy Vox helped us build,” says Erasmus.

Migrating to the Cloud has opened the doors of Veeam Backup, a backup software sold and supported by Vox, to King Price. “Veeam Backup has solved a lot of problems for us, it is safe, fast, reliable and efficient,” says Erasmus. “Vox also manages our backup, not only do we have peace of mind knowing who is control of our backup at all times, but we have saved time and money when we compare Veeam Backup and Vox Managed Backup Services to our previous traditional way of backing up,” he adds.

In addition to this, Vox’s private APN (Access Point Name) enabled King Price to monitor abuse on all their SIM cards, “We can now hold staff accountable for their use of company mobile data,” says Erasmus.

Overall experience with Vox

“Vox have gone above and beyond,” says Erasmus. “We get amazing products from them and their service delivery is proactive and always on point. They always take our budget into consideration,” he adds.

Erasmus adds that he has found Vox to have a great knowledge of technology, which is always helpful to their company, “Vox goes to extreme lengths to demo products,” he says and adds that Vox sitting in on monthly meetings for service reviews is valuable.

“Any issues we have had with Vox products have been on the fault of third-party vendors,” says Erasmus, “and Vox has been quick to help us with those issues and liaise with said vendors,” he adds.

Industry: Wildlife

Kwandwe Private Game Reserve adopts the Vox Animal Monitor for one of its young female buffalos to trial how the device and app works, and to see if it’s worth investing in more for their high-value animals.

About Kwandwe Private Game Reserve

Situated on the outskirts of Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape, incepted in 2001, the award-winning, big five safari destination specialises in high-end eco-tourism. Best-known for quality guiding, understated luxury and the thousands of animals and wildlife that call the reserve home, Kwandwe comprises of 22 000 hectares of pristine private wilderness that stretches either side of the Great Fish River.

The game lodge is also a conservation victory. “The successful development of this high yield/low impact conservation model is key to furthering our numerous conservation initiatives,” says Kwandwe Wildlife & Managing Director, Angus Shalto-Douglas. “Thousands of animals including lion, black and white rhino, buffalo, elephant and cheetah roam the plains, and the Reserve is also sanctuary to numerous other threatened and endangered species. We also currently employ 250 staff members.”

We have really enjoyed testing the Vox Animal Monitor on our young female buffalo.

The Business Challenge

Thanks to the exponential rise of rhino poaching in Southern African, Kwandwe’s majestic giants are their top priority and biggest challenge. ‘Rhino security and monitoring, as well as predator management, are the biggest challenges we’ve faced over the years,” says Shalto-Douglas.

According to The Department of Environmental Affairs, 1 028 rhinos were poached in 2017 alone. With an estimated 25 000 rhinos left on the continent, it’s little wonder that rhino tracking is a massive challenge for wildlife owners.

‘We need a tracking system that works,” explains Shalto-Douglas. ‘We want a solution that allows us to track high-value animals, and monitor our rhinos. Our teams spend ages tracking and finding our animals, and if this could be alleviated it would help us a great deal.”

The Business Solution

Shalto-Douglas was approached by the Vox team to trial their Animal Monitor on one of Kwandwe’s female buffalos. At the time, Kwandwe were keeping tabs on their high-value animals with African Wildlife Tracking VHF and GSM collars. “The VHF collars and foot collars had reasonable-to-good success,” says Shalto-Douglas. “However, we were drawn to the Vox Animal Monitor because it offered the same benefits, as well as the ability to track the animal’s live position – making them easily accessible – as well as capturing historical movement data to pick up behavioural trends.”

Implementation

Kwandwe have been using the Vox Animal Monitor on their buffalo since April 2018, darting her to place the device around her neck. In that time, with no discomfort to the animal, the game lodge has been able to track her via GPS, set virtual boundaries – like geofencing their watering holes – monitor her habitual activities (and that of her herd) like grazing, and predict if she is getting ill, is in heat, or pregnant thanks to temperature control.

“We are busy trialling the Vox Animal Monitor to see how the tracking system works,” says Shalto-Douglas. “We aim to use it on other animals – and primarily would like to track our rhinos. The Vox loT App is easy to install and navigate. It works well and I can understand it efficiently.”

A solution that allows us to track high-value animals, and monitor our rhinos.

Benefits

Using the Vox Animal Monitor has allowed Kwandwe to:

• Set virtual boundaries on their buffalo – like geofencing watering holes – so they can collect data and notice behavioural patterns.
• Because buffalos are social animals, they can monitor the buffalo and her herd’s habitual activities like grazing.
• Predict when she is getting ill, is in heat or pregnant thanks to temperature control.
• Promote the protection of the buffalo and her herd.
• Improve conservation efforts, tying in with Kwandwe’s philosophy

Shalto-Douglas says that the biggest advantage of the Vox Animal Monitor is its financial benefit. “In terms of positively affecting our business operations, the device saves us costs as we now know where the animal is when we go to look for it. Previously, we were wasting precious time and resources tracking down our animals.

“We are mainly using the tracker to look at historical movement and present position,” says Shalto-Douglas. “It works really well and we have had no issues as of yet. If the Vox Animal Tracker can be made to fit a rhino, it will have a huge influence on our conservation efforts, save us even more costs and allow us to react to emergencies a lot better and faster. Our priority for research and development is now rhino tracking and monitoring.”

About Vox

Innovation and insight combine in Vox, a market leading end-to-end integrated ICT and telecommunications company. We have an enviable track record of meeting the needs of thousands of consumers, SMEs, large corporates, and public sector organisations. Thanks to our dedicated staff of more than 1 500 people – and our several hundred business partners countrywide – we set the benchmark for service delivery by connecting people through best-of-breed technology.

From data to voice, as well as cloud, business collaboration and conferencing tools, Vox offers intelligent solutions that connect South Africans to the world, supporting entrepreneurs, customers and commerce, whilst practicing values of integrity, choice and service excellence in all of its dealings.

For more information, visit www.vox.co.za

Industry: Wildlife

Tootabi Hunting Safaris adopts a Vox Agri-Tech Animal Monitor to track and capture data on one of its male buffalos at its Olifantskop Lodge in the Eastern Cape.

About Tootabi Hunting Safari

Built on privately-owned family land, Tootabi (meaning ‘place of sweet honey’) was founded in 2013 as a single hunting area and lodge. It has since expanded into covering over 1 000 000 acres of free-range terrain and operates six lodges and camps over five countries – including South Africa, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Uganda, and Mauritius. Tootabi is dedicated to environmentally conscious hunting activities, sustainable conservation and empowerment of local communities.

“We aim our services towards high-end executives who are financially capable of coming back more than once,” says Loodt Büchner, Tootabi International Relations Manager. “We strive to offer the same quality of service each time across a diversity of different terrains.”

The Business Challenge

Apart from economic factors that are impacting the wildlife industry – like unprecedented drought, wildfires, and less than inspired game prices – diseases and animal demand form a large part of Tootabi’s main challenges.

“We needed a solution that allowed us to monitor the animals’ behaviour, capture data to pick up trends, and that alerted us when the animal is sick,” explains Büchner. “For health purposes, it was essential that we could get to them faster and deliver a healthy animal of value to the client, and future game breeders.”

The Business Solution

Büchner met Vox CEO, Jacques du Toit, and Senior Project Manager: Vox Agri-Tech, Deon Oosthuysen, at the 2018 Wildlife Ranching South Africa (WRSA) Conference where he was introduced to the company’s animal tracking solution.

“I was drawn to the Vox stand and the stuffed kudu with an animal tracker around its neck,” Büchner says. “As a tech-fundi myself, it immediately sparked my interest. Once Du Toit and Oosthysen explained what the tracker did, I was sold.”

Büchner purchased the Vox Animal Monitor for one of Tootabi’s male buffalos due to it being a high-value animal and a social one. “It made a lot of sense to track one of our buffalos, as they are cohesive animals who don’t want to be alone – he runs in a herd of 50 other animals which means that if I track him, I track all of them,” he says. “They are worth a total value of between R10-15 million so knowing where to find the herd at any given time is hugely beneficial for my business.”

Thanks to the Vox Animal Monitor, Büchner and his team are now able to monitor the buffalo’s grazing patterns, track its movement, and monitor its temperature at all hours of the day. “The tracker enables us to know where the animal and its herd are at all times,” he says. “And for any farmer, you don’t get better than that.”

Knowing where to find the herd at any given time is hugely beneficial for my business

Implementation

The Tootabi team have been using the Vox Animal Monitor since the beginning of May 2018. “We first practiced using the device on one of our horses,” he explains. “We then darted the buffalo, moved him to the reserve area, and placed the device on him rather effortlessly. It doesn’t affect the animal at all – he doesn’t even know it’s there. It’s brilliant.”

Büchner and his rangers then downloaded the Vox IoT app on their smartphones, so that they could all track the animal. “It was easy to install and navigate,” he says. “We all use the app with great efficiency.”

The Benefits

When it came to keeping tabs on their animals in the past, Büchner explains that Tootabi used cameras that proved to be expensive and difficult to monitor as they didn’t track all areas that the animals would roam. They also had their rangers physically track the animal – which wasn’t a viable solution.

“It’s difficult having to hire personnel to monitor the animals continuously,” Büchner explains. “It’s time-consuming and – as we know – time is money these days. The Vox Animal Monitor is so much more efficient and it supersedes any other technology Tootabi has ever used before. While we still get the rangers to track the animals for anti-poaching purposes, the tracker is much more effective as we can check in with the animal in seconds through the Vox IoT app that’s very user-friendly. We love everything about it and highly recommend it to any farmer who has a group or herd of animals.”

Using the Vox Animal Monitor has allowed Tootabi to:

• Set virtual boundaries on their buffalo – like geofencing watering holes – so they can collect data and notice behavioural patterns
• Monitor the buffalo and his herd’s habitual activities like grazing, and predict when he is getting ill thanks to temperature control
• Promote the protection of the buffalo’s herd
• Improve conservation efforts, tying in with Tootabi’s philosophy

Thanks to the Vox Animal Tracker, I got a better insurance premium on the buffalo.

Additional Benefits

“Thanks to the Vox Animal Tracker, I got a better insurance premium on the buffalo. I now save roughly R100 on the animal every month because the device and app can give me assurance that he is well and alive or getting sick ahead of time.  I can also make sure the animal never leaves my property. Not only am I saving money on my premium, but thanks to the affordability of the Vox Animal Monitor, I am saving all-round.”

“We are very happy with the way the Vox Animal Tracker has performed, and would certainly consider investing in more – especially to track our rhinos in an anti-poaching effort.”

“The Vox Animal Monitor is so much more efficient and it supersedes any other technology Tootabi has ever used before. We love everything about it and highly recommend it to any farmer who has a group or herd of animals.”

Not only am I saving money on my premium, but thanks to the affordability of the Vox Animal Monitor, I am saving all-round.

About Vox

Innovation and insight combine in Vox, a market leading end-to-end integrated ICT and telecommunications company. We have an enviable track record of meeting the needs of thousands of consumers, SMEs, large corporates, and public sector organisations. Thanks to our dedicated staff of more than 1 500 people – and our several hundred business partners countrywide – we set the benchmark for service delivery by connecting people through best-of-breed technology.

From data to voice, as well as cloud, business collaboration and conferencing tools, Vox offers intelligent solutions that connect South Africans to the world, supporting entrepreneurs, customers and commerce, whilst practicing values of integrity, choice and service excellence in all of its dealings.

For more information, visit www.vox.co.za

 

About Otto Brothers

Otto Brothers (trading as Power Fashion Factory) is a Durban-based fashion retailer with 105 stores across Kwa-Zulu Natal, Gauteng as well as the Eastern and Western Cape. Continuously expanding, they focus on low-income households and source stock locally to keep costs down so that they can provide the best value for money to their customers.

Over the years, the company ended up using several legacy systems that were no longer capable of meeting its requirements. Accurately keeping track of huge volumes of business records was becoming impossible, and an immediate change was needed.

Critically, there was only a short time-frame in which new systems had to be implemented, before these system limitations started impacting negatively on the daily operations of the business.

Challenge

Otto Brothers turned to local ICT companies to provide a them with an end-to-end implementation of the Microsoft Dynamics NAV, including the integration of third-party add-on modules that were specific to the retail industry.

The company initiated a formal process during which two different products from six vendors were evaluated, of which three were shortlisted. These vendors were then invited on-site, allowing key role players at Otto Brothers to meet the respective consultants and management teams who would be assigned to the project.

Otto Brothers selected Braintree citing its customer-centric approach, as well as the honesty, flexibility and understanding of the management team, the quality of the development lead put forward, and the innovative development methodology proposed.

Solution

A series of onsite workshops, including a diagnostic exercise and needs analysis, were conducted with key role players to identify existing processes and shortcomings, and determine the scope and direction of the project.

Following this, Braintree used a team of nine developers and consultants to implement Microsoft Dynamics NAV on-premise at Otto Brothers’ head office, with integration to the company’s retail network across the country.

Business requirements not available in the native product were addressed either through software customisation or third-party add-ons – such as the integration of the LS Retail add-on, which provides functionality specific to the retail industry.

The implementation included the migration of all historic data, the implementation of a Business Intelligence (BI) solution, advanced reporting functionality, and some customisation to the core Microsoft Dynamics NAV product.

Braintree were willing to take on a project with an extremely short implementation time-frame and tight deadlines. Overall, they exceeded expectations.

To shorten the development process and enhance the quality of the end product, Braintree combined key elements of an Agile development methodology with the more traditional Waterfall approach that is used by most other systems integrators.

User training and user acceptance testing was conducted before going live, to ensure that end users could conduct tasks efficiently, and to ensure that the system performed as expected.

User training and acceptance testing was conducted before going live to ensure that the users could conduct their tasks efficiently, and to ensure that the system performed as expected. The entire project, from initiation to go-live, took seven months to complete – a record under the circumstances.

Post-implementation steps included go-live handholding and a combination of both on-premise and remote support.

Before the changeover, critical applications on the legacy systems had limitations to the size of document numbers supported, and the company ended up cycling through document numbers every three months. This is no longer the case, and the growing business can now accurately keep track of all its purchase orders, shipments and in-store shipment receipts.

“I would recommend Braintree,” says Otto Brothers IT Manager, Jacques Vermeulen. “They have a very customer-centric approach to doing business, and they were willing to take on a project with an extremely short implementation time-frame and tight deadlines. Overall, they exceeded expectations.”