Greek Supermarket Chain Shops Around Before Choosing NetOp Remote Control

AB Vassilopoulos, a large supermarket chain in Greece with headquarters in Athens, has chosen NetOp Remote Control version 8.0 for its technical support department and its branch offices. The supermarket chain is taking advantage of the latest version of NetOp Remote Control and has seen some immediate benefits.

The Vassilopoulos brothers, Gerassimos and Charalambos, established Alfa Beta Vassilopoulos in December 1969. In November 1990, it was listed in the Main Market of Athens Stock Exchange and is continuing its dynamic growth as one of the best and largest supermarket chains in Greece. Alfa Beta supermarket values quality, variety, and service, and prioritizes high levels of productivity.

With its staff numbering 6,453, Alfa Beta is classed as one of the major employers in Greece. It has 33 support staff in two technical departments in different parts of Greece, each responsible for supporting the stores throughout the country. Each technical department has three employees working at a help desk and three employees responsible for supporting both the stores and headquarters remotely.

Managing a network remotely is particularly important to Alfa Beta because they have so many employees spread across Greece. The supermarket chain was already familiar with the NetOp products and knew they were very flexible, so when the company decided to improve on their system they naturally considered NetOp Remote Control. And, when deciding to install NetOp, the cross-platform ability of the product, the connectivity of the Gateway, and the Inventory and the Scripting features in particular were all key.

“Originally, we were using an older version of NetOp in some of our stores,” explains Mavromichalis Tasos, IT Stores Support Manager at Alfa Beta, “but we wanted the efficiency of a more centralized system and we needed the speed that an upgrade could provide. So, we looked at the products on the market and made a feasibility study, which included benchmarking, and NetOp did particularly well, especially in terms of speed.”

Each Alfa Beta branch in Greece has installed NetOp Gateway (a special Host module of NetOp Remote Control that acts as a routing mechanism for NetOp traffic). All traffic is diverted to the host computers on the LAN. Without jeopardizing security, the versatile communication layer in NetOp Gateway offers a single entry point from the Internet, allowing Alfa Beta support staff to easily access the computers at all the branches across Greece. In this way, Alfa Beta has centralized its supply of support, and it now uses NetOp Remote Control to enable its IT professionals to access virtually any desktop and server platform remotely.

The solution provides the highest level of centrally managed secure connectivity and supports all of Alfa Beta’s communication protocols. Alfa Beta also uses the user development tools in NetOp for some of their development functions and to support the automatic transfer of information from the stores to the headquarters. “The main advantage of NetOp is that it allows us to provide centralized maintenance for all our stores. And its speed is also a huge advantage. It makes it very easy to support quick decisions, “enthuses Tasos. “We wanted to have remote access for all the stores because we want to support maintenance remotely and now, using NetOp Remote Control, this is possible.”

Another winning product from NetOp that appealed to the supermarket chain is NetOp School. “We see a great advantage in being able to train our IT staff remotely, “explains Tasos. “There are often changes in the applications that we use, so we have to train our IT staff on a regular basis. We have stores spread throughout the whole of Greece, and NetOp saves us a great deal of time and money and also enables us to give all our IT employees (even the ones in remote corners) the training that they need.”

Alfa Beta has big plans for using NetOp throughout the organization and is really pleased with the smooth installation. “Training our technical staff is going well, the next phase is training the employees in the stores to use the product,” says Tasos. In the second phase of the installation, Alfa Beta plans to centrally support scaling machines that are used to weigh products in the stores.

The advantages that Alfa Beta is already enjoying are numerous. As a result of the NetOp installation, Alfa Beta has reduced network management costs at the headquarters, reduced the cost of support staff having to travel from Athens to the branches, and managing the supply of IT support staff to the branches has been improved. “We have really been satisfied with our new and improved system,” says Tasos. ”We are really impressed by the speed of communication. It’s very easy to use and the business benefits of using the system are already clear to us. In the near future, we look forward to continuing to take full advantage of the NetOp range of products, “ concludes Tasos.

For more information about AB Vassilopoulos, please visit www.ab.gr