Premium Sound Solutions is a leading automotive and consumer sound manufacturer headquartered in Belgium, with offices across the world including plants in Asia, Europe and Mexico. The nearly 50-year-old company has a broad customer base that includes BMW, Audi, Cisco and BOSE.
Premium Sound Solutions (PSS) first came to Aryaka in search of a way to increase bandwidth to improve redundancy and network performance, while decreasing costs. While on their previous MPLS network, PSS was not protected against outages that disrupted production. In one incident, the company was down for a full eight hours. In such a demanding industry, PSS could not afford long outages, yet could also not afford the high costs of maintaining redundancy on an MPLS network.
Additionally, production at PSS is heavily reliant upon their cloud-hosted ERP, PLM and CAT systems. For optimal performance, the company needs a reliable connection.
Lastly, employees based in China were having issues working with large metadata in Microsoft SharePoint. China-based users resorted to working locally with the data and buy-in of the platform was non-existent in China. As a result, the company struggled to achieve global collaboration on the tool.
After deploying Aryaka SmartServices, Premium Sound Solutions was able to increase bandwidth at every site, improving redundancy and performance. Within their own sites, they are now able to replicate servers between manufacturing plants – a feat that was previously “unthinkable,” with MPLS, according to Jan De Beule, Infrastructure Manager at Premium Sound Solutions.
The improved network performance accelerated critical applications, like the ERP, PLM and CAT systems, and provided much needed reliability. Replication times for large development drawings, for example, were reduced from 8-9 hours down to just one hour. In another example, ISO files that previously took one hour to download now took just 20 seconds.
For end-users in China, the improved SharePoint performance led to wider adoption of the tool and increased collaboration and productivity.
Finally, transitioning to Aryaka SmartServices also meant an improvement in customer support.
“Aryaka support? In one word: awesome! I don’t know where you get the people, but I have never met people who work that diligently, are dedicated and quick. And also, they think with the customer. We don’t have to specify what we want. If we explain what we want to do, they think with us to come up with a solution.“
– Jan De Beule, Infrastructure Manager at Premium Sound Solutions
