A land flowing with milk and honey

The administrative district of Piątnica, located in the north-eastern outskirts of Poland, has a long history of dairy production which dates back to the mid-19th century. Today, OSM Piątnica’s fresh, natural dairy products like milk, butter, kefirs, creams, yoghurts, cottage cheese or milk cocktails can be found each day in literally every grocery store in Poland.

What allowed the Regional Dairy Cooperative to evolve from a small local factory to the leading dairy manufacturer and one of the 50 most valuable brands in Poland, was the introduction of the so called ‘Serek Wiejski’ (a type of cottage cheese). Today, OSM Piątnica is the biggest manufacturer of the pot style cottage cheese in the whole wide world. Each year the company buys more than 300 mln liters of milk from around 2200 agricultural holdings located in the Podlasie region – one of the most ecologically clean areas in the country, for which it’s often called ‘the Green Lungs of Poland’.

While OSM Piątnica is holding on to the traditional values, it is also one of the most technologically advanced and fastest growing dairy companies in Poland. In the last few years, the Regional Dairy Cooperative has expanded and modernized its factory in the village of Piątnica. The company’s total capital expenditure value in 2014 was more than EUR 13 mln – the money was spent, among other things, on a new cottage cheese production line and a fully automated high storage warehouse – a first of its kind in the Polish dairy industry.

Today the Regional Dairy Cooperative employs around 1,000 people in its manufacturing site in Piątnica and in the second factory in Ostrołęka, situated 40 kilometers away. Both sites have recently deployed core and edge switches from Extreme Networks. What were the goals of the infrastructure modernization initiative? What kind of challenges drove the company to this decision?

The task of modernizing OSM Piątnica’s network infrastructure was handed to IBCS Poland – a leading supplier of IT solutions for optimizing logistic, warehouse and sales operations, specialized in the manufacturing and trading sector. The goals of the project? The ability to easily manage the entire enterprise network, in-depth analytics of the occurrences in the network environment and raising the overall level of network performance and security.

“From our point of view, the biggest challenge was to ensure end-to-end management combined with a reliable network access control. The heterogeneous network environment and limited access to certain service didn’t necessarily make the task easier for us”, says Piotr Tamulewicz, Logistics and Warehouse Advisor at IBCS Poland.

As if all that weren’t enough, the project coincided with the pandemic which brought additional challenges. Despite the difficulties posed by the restrictions and lockdown, IBCS Poland’s teams managed to consult the work progress on a regular basis.

“We did regular teleconference calls with the OSM Piątnica team. By a joint effort, we managed to identify and eliminate any obstacles. Despite the surrounding limitations, both parties did their best to see the implementation through”, says Daniel Przyborowski, Business Development Manager at IBCS Poland.

The project was split into two essential phases. First was the analysis of the client’s expectations combined with the existing LAN and WLAN infrastructure audit. Next step was to implement the proposed solutions.

The second phase involved installation and configuration of Extreme Networks core and edge switches, as well as the monitoring and management software. As part of the modernization project, IBCS Poland’s technicians integrated the old WLAN with the new LAN, wrote the implementation documentation and trained OSM Piątnica’s IT team on the new network infrastructure monitoring and management system.

Building the network on new Extreme switches allowed engineers to establish a reliable and secure connectivity between the company’s separate locations. In order to reach the stated objectives, IBCS suggested the implementation of the Extreme Management Center (XMC). The solution is now fully integrated with the Cooperative’s network environment, allowing a single pane of glass, end-to-end management of multiple sites.

The solutions put forward by IBCS Poland helped increase the level of OSM Piątnica’s network security quite significantly. What’s more, the simplified management of the entire network environment has made it much easier for the local IT team. The Regional Dairy Cooperative has now access to the full breadth of information about their network status, connected devices and activities of the individual users.

“We had quite a lot of bidders for our project. The scope of solution, combined with the additional network monitoring and management capabilities eventually tipped the scale in favor of IBCS Poland”, says Zbigniew Koplin, Information Technology Business Manager at the Regional Dairy Cooperative OSM Piątnica. “The deployment of solutions proposed by IBCS Poland allowed us to enhance our security and performance, as well as manage the entire network, and thus accomplished all the objectives set at the beginning”.

It’s also worth mentioning that the new environment has been designed and deployed in a fashion that allows its smooth and seamless expansion in the future. The scalable and flexible solution in place can be expanded at any given time, based on the ongoing growth and evolving needs of the Regional Dairy Cooperative.

IBCS Poland is a provider of solutions optimizing logistic processes in supply chain area. For almost two decades, IBCS Poland have supported manufacturing and commerce companies and logistic operators, increasing their effectiveness in the field of logistics.

IBCS Poland’s employees form a competence Centre – one of the biggest in Poland – in the field of logistics and mobile IT solutions, offering the highest quality of consulting in the following areas:

IBCS Poland provide services in the area of design, measurement and audit of wireless networks based on over 20 years of experience in working on wireless networks for logistics and industry. The company provides services using fully professional software and hardware, and each completed order is completed with a comprehensive and professional report.