Company
Since 1980, the Dentaid Group has been focusing on improving people’s oral health through cutting-edge solutions in the hands of dentists, dental hygienists and pharmacists. Innovation, strict standards, commitment and responsibility with respect to people’s oral and dental health are the firm’s guiding principles. The main components of the group are Dentaid, which produces chemical solutions (topical fluoride, toothpaste) and sells physical and chemical products; PHB, which sells physical and chemical solutions; and Medical Devices, responsible for the manufacturing of physical products (manual and electric toothbrushes as well as irrigators).
Dentaid’s customers are clinics, pharmacies, parapharmacies, large supermarkets, distributors and wholesalers. Its salesforce is divided into medical visit teams, that look to win prescriptions, and teams that visit pharmacies. The company has a Spanish workforce of more than 400 people, and in 2017 surpassed the threshold of €100 million invoiced for the first time. Dentaid has a factory in Cerdanyola, where its head offices are also located, and another in Llinars del Vallés, where its logistics centre is located, both in the province of Barcelona. In addition, it has branches in Barcelona, Bilbao, Madrid, Oviedo, Seville and Valencia in order to create the network necessary for its business activities.
Digital transformation and internationalisation
The group currently faces two key challenges in its future. One is the digital transformation that will lead it to upgrade to a cloud-based technological architecture and the other is its internationalisation process, demonstrated by the opening of European (Germany, France, Holland and Italy) and Latin American (Colombia, Chile and Peru) branches. With respect to this proposal, possessing a communications structure with flexible products and services that are also robust and scalable, guaranteeing both Internet access and communication between group headquarters, was fundamental.
Previously, Dentaid had an MPLS infrastructure that experienced recurring incidents with an inadequate support service, via which it was difficult to talk to a qualified technician to quickly resolve incidents. The reason for starting the relationship with Colt was basically the need to optimise after-sale and customer service, which with the previous provider were not adapted to the company’s needs and caused continuous incidents. “We even had a problem with the router, which operated very slowly for a couple of days, preventing the MPLS connection to local offices, as well as continuous voice incidents with one headquarters, because they were incapable of correctly defining the configuration”, explains Rafael Sarrión, ICT Manager at Dentaid.
In July 2017, in conjunction with Colt, the company started a new project to improve communications, incorporating the Colt IP VPN Plus, and Colt IP Access services. Colt IP Access guarantees a high-speed Internet-access service backed by Colt’s network, adapted to the growing demands of digital transformation processes and enabling a continuous connection through practically unlimited bandwidth.
With Colt IP VPN, the company can operate on a private and secure network that offers the savings benefits of a global shared network, by connecting the Dentaid locations on a private network that doesn’t cross the public network. This prevents data theft or filtration and denial-of-service attacks, guaranteeing the security expected of a private network while maintaining benefits in terms of the cost implied by a personal shared network. With Colt VPN Plus as a professional connectivity solution, Dentaid can create wide area networks (WAN) or metropolitan area networks (MAN) through a LAN interface, simplifying management.
The first phase of the deployment involved providing Internet access and connecting headquarters, branches and offices via MPLS.At commercial headquarters, Dentaid has small teams of professionals that remotely access SAP ERP and communicate via VOIP through the MPLS and use a series of corporate applications that require bandwidth. Within MPLS, Dentaid has included a connection to Amazon Web Services to deploy services on this platform, migrating ERP from Cerdanyola to Amazon’s headquarters in Ireland with IP VPN .Within this cloud architecture and in addition to ERP, Dentaid now possesses a customer relations management (CRM) system on a software as a service basis, which communicates with ERP via an Enterprise Bus Service also hosted on Amazon’s cloud. European and Latin American subsidiaries are not yet connected to Colt’s services, as the first phase of the communications improvement project covers headquarters and commercial branches in Spain.
Future
This change has brought an improvement in capabilities that has led Dentaid to broaden its horizons, making a significant investment in communications in order to orient the business toward the future. ‘The path to the cloud is a progressive process because we are designing it at the same time as the internationalisation process. We are going to try to use the same tools and resources at all of our subsidiaries, making these accessible on the cloud by means of reliable, robust and scalable communications. ’For Dentaid, management and maintenance make the difference. ‘Colt is a global communications operator with many strengths, but what we are looking for in this case is service. In this sense, the business service and customer service that Colt provides us is highly satisfactory.’ Sarrión explains that the day-to-day is improving in terms of all connection needs across all use profiles. He believes that having a single, reliable communications supplier covering the full spectrum of needs and alongside, which it is possible to continue to grow, is ‘fundamental for Dentaid’
