It's always about the value brought to the table

With more than 2,500 employees working in its distribution centers, transportation and service offices, as well as – last but not least – 153 stores that are visited by nearly 2 million customers each month, Leen Bakker can be easily identified as the single largest omnichannel value discounter of the home furnishing sector in the Netherlands and Belgium. The company is owned by Homefashion Group, along with the sister brand Kwantum, which offers contemporary wall, window, and floor products to upholster and decorate homes.

Leen Bakker enables its customers to create a warm and cozy home, with made-to-measure sofas, box springs and window furnishings, delivered and fitted conveniently at their homes, at an affordable price. The company’s mission is to enable as many people as possible to enjoy affordable furnishings for their homes and gardens.

In order to enable reliable wireless connectivity at a reasonable price to drive high-quality end-user experience for both customers and employees, Leen Bakker decided to introduce a completely new wireless infrastructure in all of its 153 brick-and-mortar stores across the Netherlands and Belgium. A decision of that kind of magnitude usually requires careful consideration and a lot of planning, not unlike renovating a house or furnishing an apartment, for example.

However, in this case, the customer knew exactly what kind of technology partner could meet their Wi-Fi requirements. Thanks to the highly positive experience with the previous Wi-Fi implementation for Kwantum, Homefashion Group, owner of Leen Bakker, once again decided to leverage the power of Extreme Networks solutions.

“We have been using Extreme Networks products since 2016, so we are very much familiar with their technology and what it’s bringing to the table. Suffice to say, all of our offices and distribution centers are using Extreme solutions as a standard”, says Gertjan Pruim, IT Infrastructure & Operations Manager at Homefashion Group. “The products that we’re using are nothing short of stable, we have yet to experience any issue with the access points”.

As the number of connected users and devices in Leen Bakker stores steadily grew, so did the requirements in terms of Wi-Fi speed, coverage, and capacity. While its previous generations of 802.11n and 802.11ac (wave 1 and 2) could be considered generational improvements, with an emphasis on faster speeds, the utilized 802.11ax technology – better known as Wi-Fi 6 – instead enhanced efficiency as well as speed, taking the company’s wireless networks to an entirely new level.

To that end, Gertjan Pruim and his colleagues decided to leverage the capabilities of the AP305C – an enterprise-grade access point that is ideal for budget-conscious enterprises who do not want to sacrifice performance. The solution, based on a new system-on-a-chip (SoC) with two built-in dual-band radios, provides exceptional value with Wi-Fi 6 high efficiency. Advanced radio technology delivers 802.11ax 2x2:2 data rates up to 2.4 Gbps concurrently on both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz radios.

“We chose the Extreme Networks AP305C at Homefashion Group, because our Kwantum and Leen Bakker stores especially need a reliable, well-performing Wi-Fi. The specifications just fit exactly what we needed”, Gertjan Pruim admits.

In today’s world, as businesses make capital investments in their technology infrastructure, they must keep a watchful eye on how those investments actually improve operational efficiency. That being said, Leen Bakker chose their new wireless network solution not only based on the offered performance, but also its hardware agility.

The AP305C is part of Extreme’s Universal Platforms and allows users to choose how they want to manage their Wi-Fi, depending on the switchable OS. This multi-persona capability not only provides Leen Bakker with increased product flexibility and reduced hardware obsolescence for the future – it enabled a more convenient and cost-efficient cloud management. A benefit on its own, given the scale of the modernization project.

The scope of the modernization project involved the design and implementation of more than 1,200 access points in all 153 Leen Bakker stores throughout the Netherlands and Belgium. In order to make this process as smooth as possible, the company decided to partner up with Complit Networks, a well-established player in the Benelux Wi-Fi market, with a very strong background in the retail sector, as evidenced by previous successful implementations for Colruyt and Spar, to name a few.

Complit Networks handled the complete design of all 153 stores. Through cloud-enabled automations, the company’s engineers loaded all floor plans and took care of naming, ensuring that there was no margin for error and everything went flawlessly. Suffice to say, Complit Networks managed to configure most of the APs within a month and a half, ensuring a smooth rollout.

“We installed and configured more than 1,200 APs at all Leen Bakker stores. In collaboration with TW Solutions, this project went super smoothly”, says Jonas Dekkers, co-founder and CEO of Complit Networks.

TW Solutions provided the installations as a subcontractor.

“We provided the complete Wi-Fi solution together with Complit Networks, as well as the full rollout so that our partner only had to configure remotely and check that everything was live”, says Martin Wit, Commercial Director & Co-owner at TW Solutions b.v. “The installation and implementation went very smoothly, we covered the stores in about 4 months.”

“In addition to the fast service and high-quality products, the price-quality ratio was also excellent. We are very satisfied with the smooth cooperation. We couldn't have wished for better partners!”, says Gertjan Pruim.

As the number of connected users and devices grows, cyber-threats skyrocket and become more advanced. On that front, the utilized access points from Extreme support the latest Wi-Fi Alliance WPA3 security certifications, as well as a stateful L2-L7 DPI firewall for context-based access security. And while 802.1X is still the most secure authentication method for enterprise Wi-Fi, sometimes it may be seen as difficult to deploy, configure, and troubleshoot. So how did Complit and Extreme address that issue? By enabling the Private Pre-Shared Keys (PPSK) functionality!

What’s special about the PPSK technology is that it blends ease of deployment and use with robust enterprise security. In practice, PPSK is a unique pre-shared key assigned to a user rather than to an SSID. With this approach, Gertjan Pruim and his colleagues from the IT team can assign different PPSKs and user profiles to different users on the same SSID. If a user is no longer permitted to use the WLAN or a wireless client becomes lost, stolen, or compromised, it is possible to revoke just that user's PPSK, without having to reconfigure the PPSKs on all the other clients, meaning big time savings.

“We rely very heavily on Private Pre-Shared Keys, it is a pivotal element of our multi-layered Wi-Fi security strategy with 802.1X. This effortless Wi-Fi security from Extreme Networks is the killer feature we were looking for. It goes along nicely with our new, super reliable and highly efficient, cloud-managed wireless network”, Gertjan Pruim explains.

“Our cloud ecosystem makes it very easy to onboard BYOD and IoT use cases, and create an encrypted guest Wi-Fi as a value-added service”, says John Rutgers, Account Manager at Extreme Networks involved in the project. “Complit Networks makes optimal use of our possibilities. This allowed us to roll out a project of that magnitude fairly easily. We can therefore proudly say that we worked out this project, one of the larger European retail projects over the past year, flawlessly.”

Complit Networks is a well-established company within the On IT group and specializes in Wi-Fi networks. They offer a wide range of services including site surveys, configuration, troubleshooting and facility works to provide their clients with reliable and efficient Wi-Fi solutions. As a leading player in Wi- Fi networking, Complit Networks is known for their professional approach, technical expertise and focus on customer satisfaction.

TW Solutions is a Dutch company that, as a subcontractor, solves your security, fire alarm and data network installation issues. On behalf of their partners, they provide the installations and final assembly of the components.

Kappa Data was chosen as a distributor because of its excellent value-added services in technical, sales and pre-sales phases. The relationship between Complit Networks and Kappa Data has developed over the years and is very constructive. Projects are not tackled alone, they are best completed with the help of a distributor with the necessary experience.