Case Study / Manufacturing
Mannington Mills Flooring Lays
Strong Network Foundation
with Cradlepoint
SUMMARY
Mannington Mills Inc., is one of the largest flooring companies in
the world and as the business grows, so does its IT requirements.
Cradlepoint enables Mannington Mills to successfully support
changing business needs with a scalable, easy-to-use solution
that provides reliable backup connectivity for business locations
across the U.S. In fact, the deployments are so effective that
the company leverages Cradlepoint solutions to more quickly
get new locations up and running while waiting for traditional
wired connections to be installed. Moreover, Mannington Mills
is eliminating its traditional DSL lines at some locations and
using wireless for primary network connectivity. These reliable
connections enable the IT team to reduce costs and the scope
of work for location openings, cut the stress of managing wired
lines, and gain ultimate confidence it can address changing
network challenges anytime, anywhere.
PRODUCT:
ARC SERIES
APPLICATION:
FAILOVER FOR BUSINESS
CONTINUITY, PRIMARY-CONNECT
MARKET:
MANUFACTURING, RETAIL,
WAREHOUSE MANAGEMENT
Case Study / Manufacturing
COMPANY PROFILE
Mannington Mills manufactures residential and
commercial sheet vinyl, luxury vinyl, laminate,
hardwood, and porcelain tile floors, as well as
commercial carpet and rubber. Founded in 1915
and still privately owned, the company continues
its commitment to quality, customer satisfaction,
and the environment through innovative
product design and marketing, state-of-theart processes, and industry-leading programs.
The company’s flooring products have received
numerous awards for their outstanding style,
design, and innovative technologies.
“We implement technology to make the business
more efficient. We are constantly looking for
new innovations to help us better serve our
customers,” said John Leonowich, director of
technology solutions for Mannington Mills.
BUSINESS NEEDS
Two of Mannington Mills’ main IT priorities are
redundancy and reliability. As the business grows
and depends increasingly on remote computing
applications, reliable connectivity is missioncritical to supporting Mannington Mills’ success.
Traditionally, each business location had wired
lines for main network connections and as
standby connectivity. However, this approach can
become expensive due to the associated monthly
charges. Furthermore, in remote locations,
connectivity options can be limited at best and
in urban environments, the IT team is often at
the mercy of the Telco provider’s schedule to
establish connectivity.
As Mannington Mills expands business locations,
the IT team is assigned new projects that often
have to be completed in a short amount of time
and can’t risk stalling a project just because a
service provider didn’t make it out to a job site.
In the event of a regional network outage, there
is little the IT team can do to push Telcos to more
quickly bring locations back online.
“I always want the IT team to be ahead of
business requirements and not be the hold
up of any growth. So, we decided to cut our
wired dependency and try wireless failover,”
Leonowich said.
SOLUTION
After a recommendation from its Tier 1 service
provider, Mannington Mills evaluated the
Cradlepoint ARC MBR1400 Series branch router
with integrated 3G/4G for redundancy and ondemand connectivity. The routers are easy
to install and support both wired Ethernet
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Case Study / Manufacturing
and 3G/4G wireless WAN connectivity to keep
enterprises up and running. Advanced scalability
and flexibility deliver continuous uptime
and bandwidth to ensure there is no loss of
productivity or business opportunity.
“At first I was skeptical. Wireless is not
traditionally thought to be enterprise-ready,
but I looked at other potential solutions and
quickly learned that Cradlepoint was the
leader in providing the capabilities that we
required. I actually don’t recall any comparable
competitors,” said Leonowich.
“OUR NETWORK IS DYNAMIC AND ALWAYS
CHANGING. IT IS IMPORTANT TO HAVE
SOLUTIONS THAT ENABLE US TO ADAPT.
HISTORICALLY, IT HAS THOUGHT WIRED
CONNECTIONS PROVIDE THE BEST, MOST
RELIABLE SOLUTION AND USE WIRELESS AS
BACKUP. THAT HAS FLIP-FLOPPED. TO SEE
THE CRADLEPOINT SOLUTIONS STAY UP ALL
THIS TIME HAS REALLY MADE ME A BELIEVER
IN WIRELESS TECHNOLOGY.”
—JOHN LEONOWICH, DIRECTOR OF
TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS
BENEFITS
SIMPLIFIED SCALABILITY
Mannington Flooring is able to scale its
Cradlepoint routers individually, making it easy
to swiftly adapt and grow network support as
business demands increase. This capability takes
stress off the IT team, knowing it has a solution
that it can pull off the shelf at any moment to
meet the changing needs of the business.
For example, Mannington Mills’ IT team was
challenged to very quickly open a new location
and did not have the time to coordinate the wired
connectivity with Telco providers. So, Leonowich
turned to Cradlepoint for the site’s primary
connection, and uses DSL as the backup line.
FLEXIBLE RELIABILITY
Cradlepoint also empowers Mannington Mills to
ensure constant connectivity requirements are met
in some of the most extreme—and sometimes
unexpected—networking environments.
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Case Study / Manufacturing
For example, Mannington Mills opened an important
new warehouse and selected a fiber line for its main
network connection and relied on Cradlepoint for
backup wireless. A week after the IT team finished
establishing its connectivity; an internal demolition
project contractor accidently cut the fiber optics
to the building, severing all communications to the
warehouse. The IT team was able to quickly move
its Cradlepoint wireless router on the other side
of the cut fiber and bring connectivity back to the
network the same day. In fact, Mannington Mills
moved primary connectivity over to the Cradlepoint
router to ensure a reliable network connection was
maintained to support all warehouse applications—
from shipping to inventory management—until
construction projects were completed. Without
Cradlepoint, all operations would have been at a
complete standstill.
“THAT WAS EXCITING. ALL OF A SUDDEN,
THIS OTHER REQUIREMENT CAME OUT OF
NOWHERE AND IT WAS THE CRADLEPOINT
SOLUTION TO THE RESCUE AGAIN. BECAUSE
CRADLEPOINT IS PORTABLE AND WIRELESS,
WE WERE ABLE TO POSITION IT WHERE WE
NEEDED IT TO BRING THE SITE ONLINE AGAIN.”
—JOHN LEONOWICH
GO TO CRADLEPOINT.COM TO LEARN MORE.
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