Case study
Uniting Church
When the pandemic delayed shipments of essential wireless gear for a national NGO, we tapped on high-quality refurbished devices as a stopgap to keep their digital transformation in Melbourne on track.
How we helped:
The Situation:
Urgent upgrade needed, critical gear delayed
Affinity Blue was tasked by a large Australian NGO to upgrade wireless connectivity at three of its main sites. The first of these was the NGO’s residential facility in Melbourne, where residents faced connectivity dead-zones and patchy bandwidth from a badly aged Wi-Fi network. The NGO knew it needed substantial uplift in wireless quality and reliability to power future digital investments, including using digital solutions to help residents stay informed about the outside world and in contact with loved ones.
“Expanding the site’s residential capacity had pushed the already-aging network over the brink, leaving residents with no workable connectivity and our customer with an extremely urgent situation,” says Simon Hayward, Affinity Blue’s Managing Director. “Access point, switches, cables, configurations – they needed to get rid of and replace everything.”
After an onsite survey, Affinity Blue procured the necessary access points and switches to perform a comprehensive overhaul of the network. Delivery looked straightforward, until the pandemic struck.
“All of a sudden we had more than 100 access points and switches held up in the supply chain, with the clock counting down to the customer’s urgent operational deadlines,” says Hayward. “We ended up receiving the access points with some time to spare, but none of our switches were going to arrive in time, putting the entire installation at risk of failure.”
The Solution:
Refurbished substitutes, exceptional customer service
Faced with disruption beyond their control, Affinity Blue presented an alternative to their customer: substitute high-quality refurbished switches for the delayed equipment. Once the new switches arrived, Affinity Blue would use them to swap out the refurbished stand-ins.
“We’d initially suggested performing an ‘uplift’ on the existing switches – extracting extra power from what was already installed – but the customer refused to keep any old equipment within their new network,” Hayward explains. “Using refurbished switches to fill the gaps, however, would give them the quality boost they needed and keep the project on-time despite our logistics debacle.”
The idea paid off: Affinity Blue completed the wireless refresh within a week, thanks to a staged workflow that minimised disruption for staff at the Melbourne site. Partners tasked with the network’s cabling made sure their installation – and schedules – could seamlessly accommodate the 20% of gear that hadn’t yet shown up, including the changeover from refurbished to new switches. And at one stage, the Affinity Blue team manually labelled and repacked over 100 access points based on the customer’s naming convention, in a single day.
“It takes an exceptional team to tackle exceptional circumstances,” says Hayward. “Going above and beyond in difficult situations isn’t easy, but our team and partners knew what was at stake and willingly set themselves up to do what it took to make this work.”
The Results:
New life – and potential – for digital experiences
Since the successful rollout, the NGO’s Melbourne site has benefited from substantial improvements to Wi-Fi speed, reliability, and coverage. “We’ve been told the new network has knocked out all of the dead-zones that previously plagued the site,” Hayward notes, “creating some really meaningful improvements to quality-of-life for residents stuck in lockdown due to the pandemic.”
Those quality improvements, coupled with much simpler network configuration and new features like guest network access, have put the NGO in good stead to pursue its future digital ambitions. The NGO has already begun efforts to better understand how residents and their visitors engage with digital services and content – a crucial first step in fostering a more mature and immersive digital experience in the future.
Aptly enough, the new beginnings for the Melbourne campus coincided with the end of the current IT project manager’s tenure. “Before he left the role, he wanted to wrap up several major projects including this one,” says Hayward. “It was a privilege to be able to see this network revival through, despite it almost being derailed by the pandemic, and enable him to leave this legacy for the organisation.”