Mitsubishi Motors
Timico provides an enhanced and future-proofed dealer network for The Colt Car Company (Mitsubishi Motors in the UK)
The Colt Car Company (CCC) was established as the sole UK distributor for Mitsubishi Motors in 1974. Today the company operates through a network of 117 dealerships, eleven of which are located along the M4 corridor and owned by the importer. Other sites include a specialist vehicle centre in Cirencester and an import centre in Portbury, Bristol. The company’s headquarters are based in Cirencester.
After seven years with its previous supplier, CCC decided its aged and inefficient Wide Area Network needed to be upgraded in order to meet increasing demands and to enable future requirements.
"Our old Wide Area Network was constrained by bandwidth limitations and our dealers, who could only utilise a 512k broadband service for downloading data or accessing applications, were suffering from such a slow connection. In addition, the old system would have severely limited the amount of data and applications that we might want to provide for our dealer network in future," says Stuart Smith, IT Manager at CCC.
Timico provided The Colt Car Company with a fully managed Private Wide Area Network (PWAN) to ensure a high level of security, data integrity and speed. The Head Office link was upgraded to a 50Mb/s service with expansion capability to 100Mb/s on the circuit. The 4Mb/s circuit to the internet was increased to a 200Mb/s service, which will support web browsing and web-based applications for all sites for the foreseeable future. The 106 dealer sites were upgraded to up to 8 Mb/s Broadband services and, where available, ADSL 2+ was provided which supports download speeds up to 20Mb/s.
These bandwidth improvements enable CCC to deploy and support the latest web based and Software as a Service (SaaS) applications which it would have been unable to guarantee on its legacy infrastructure. The network is capable of extensive reporting and monitoring providing full visibility of all of the hardware and lines on the network allowing CCC to maximise its effectiveness.
"The Timico solution is innovative and provides us with protection from the threat of any security or performance issues from the public internet. We have a closed, business-grade core network, which is scalable and flexible with easy addition of new sites, site changes and improved business continuity options. Furthermore, Timico’s centralised management and support of the network will increase the efficiency of our IT department as will management of centralised security policies and firewalls.
The network transition was scheduled for the middle of winter. Despite snow storms and hazardous driving conditions Timico met the tight deadline and the whole process was managed professionally. Even faced with the DVLA relocating their comms link from Manchester to Swansea, which was announced to us mid-way through the roll out, Timico’s ‘can do attitude’ meant that our dealers did not lose a single day of connectivity or the ability to register the cars they sold. This would have had serious implications to the business at an extremely important time," says Stuart Smith.
Stuart Smith
Mitsubishi Motors
