About Bakers Delight

Bakers Delight, Australia’s most successful bakery franchise was established in 1980 as a single bakery on Glenferrie Road in Hawthorn, Melbourne. Today, Bakers Delight boasts more than 700 bakeries across Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US. That’s a lot of daily-baked bread delivered to a lot of delighted customers.

Challenge

With new stores opening in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US, Bakers Delight wanted a new, secure and stable global Wide Area Network (WAN) to support its next stage of growth and to leverage future technologies. Requirements included cost-effectiveness, a security design tailored to the Bakers Delight Point Of Sale (POS) platform and the ability for individual bakeries to pay their own telco bills easily, while providing head office with a full overview. Bakers Delight also wanted bakeries and corporate connections to have an aligned contract cancellation date and to replace multiple pieces of network equipment within the space-constrained bakeries.

Solution

Bakers Delight chose Acurus as a single supplier that could provide both the WAN solution and project manage the solution’s delivery. Acurus deployed a cost-effective hybrid MPLS (Multi Protocol Label Switching) network globally that replaced multiple devices for broadband, firewall and access point services with a single FortiGate 60 CX firewall and router device from FortiNet. Each device was preconfigured by Acurus before it shipped to bakeries, making it quick and easy to deploy. As well as providing Bakers Delight with a WAN that supported global Virtual Private Network (VPN) services, Acurus segmented the VPN so stores only accessed resources relevant to their business.

Success

The Acurus global WAN provides a compelling value proposition for Bakers Delight bakeries. As well as tailoring its security design to the new Bakers Delight POS platform, the network enables each bakery to pay its own telco bills easily, while providing head office with a full overview. A key benefit of the new WAN is that Acurus implemented automatic 4G failover, so that internet access outages trigger an automated switchover to 4G mobile data access, maintaining wide area connectivity.

Acurus delivers high quality customised 24/7 support services for Bakers Delight bakeries and corporate office across Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US.  It has also aligned contracts to ensure corporate offices and bakeries share a contract cancellation date, even as new bakeries are added to the network. Acurus has also future-proofed the new network, allowing Bakers Delight to consider a range of future technology options including location services, security services, social Wi-Fi, integrated loyalty programs as well as click and collect and payment platforms.