IP Asia wide network that spans Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore

The Company

BIC® products are known and appreciated the world over for quality, affordability and ease of use. The ballpoint pens, pocket lighter, one-piece shaver, are all part of the daily lives of millions of consumers. BIC’s vision is to offer simple, inventive and reliable choices for everyone, everywhere, every time. This makes BIC® one of the best-known international brands.

BIC Singapore was set up in the 1990s to manage and support BIC's 14 markets across Asia. To date, BIC has 200 employees, 5 subsidiaries and 14 distributors in Asia.

The Opportunity

As part of its business and processes refinement plan, BIC made a decision to deploy a common ERP system for the entire region and run this from a central point, namely from regional HQ, Singapore. This is to allow BIC to manage and control the business in Asia with greater efficiency, increasing business integration by means of accurate online & real-time system for both operation and management decision-making processes.

The management team at BIC recognised a few challenges with this consolidation. In deploying the centralised applications, BIC would need a secure, reliable and scalable communications platform. This included both a private wide area network as well as a state-of-the-art data centre, in which to securely house their application servers.

Previously all communications to the HQ in Singapore was via Internet access, which were individually managed by each country. In moving to a single server, consolidated environment, BIC’s preference was to have a single service provider for all services in all countries. They recognised that in doing so they would move from managing multiple vendors themselves to a single point of contact and hence streamline their business processes.

Additionally by moving to a private MPLS network, it would achieve huge security and reliability benefits.

Importantly, as the offices in Asia begin to conform to BIC’s world standards, additional applications would need to be centralised and BIC’s intention is to use the private network for these applications too. As a result, it was essential for BIC to partner with a service provider that offers not only guarantees on services such as VoIP and MPLS (the ability to prioritise specific applications), but also one that provides a scalable network that can grow with BIC’s business requirements.

The Solution

Macquarie Telecom engaged with BIC and designed an Asia wide network that spans across multiple offices in Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore.

Leveraging on Macquarie Telecom’s Private Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) backbone, BIC is able to maximise the efficiencies of their ERP application by providing this to all offices across Asia.

Additionally, BIC benefited from Macquarie Telecom’s strong experience in partnership alliances where it was able to house BIC’s servers at a state-of-the-art data centre, which is carrier neutral. The data centre also provides BIC with management services including server monitoring, back-up systems as well remote support for adhoc engineering requirements after-hours.

Benefits and Future Plans

The roll out of the ERP solution has been instrumental in assisting BIC in eliminating certain internal processors and the management team has already begun to see the benefits via improved efficiencies.

As a result of the positive Account Management experience and efficient network, BIC Asia has asked Macquarie Telecom to potentially provide these services to their office in China too.