Dennis Asmar is a busy guy. Between running his two Electrik Beach Tanning Studios, managing his family’s rental properties, and building a new tanning salon, spare time is in short supply for Dennis. That’s why he trusts his company’s computer systems to Tech Experts.
“You wouldn’t think our business is all that complex,” said Asmar recently. “But, we have very high quality and safety standards. Before we networked our salons, a customer could tan at one salon, and then go to another of our salons and tan again. That’s just not safe.”
Asmar wanted to implement a system where all Electrik Beach Tanning Studios would talk to one another, and in January, 2005, he chose Tech Experts to implement the wide area network for his salons and home office.
Tech Experts installed Windows 2003 Servers at each location with several workstation computers. There is also a server at Asmar’s home office, with several workstations for reporting, bookkeeping and general office use. The servers link to a central database provided by Electrik Beach’s specialty software company.
Now, any Electrik Beach customer can tan at any Electrik Beach location.
“The benefits of having our systems networked are tremendous,” continued Asmar. “I don’t have to go to each salon to retrieve sales and revenue reports. All of my data is centralized in one location, and I can do all of the work to run my business from my home office.”
Customer data is vital for Electrik Beach – without it, they’re out of business. That’s why Tech Experts implemented a redundant backup system. Backup is performed by the software vendor in Georgia, and also at the local home office server in Monroe. The tape backup in Monroe is rotated daily, ensuring a good backup every time.
As Electrik Beach expands, Asmar finds he is spending more time at his home office or in the field on new salon projects, and not as much time in the salons as he’d like. For his home office staff and himself to continue to provide the necessary oversight of the salons, Tech Experts installed remote IP cameras at each location. This allows Asmar to visually see if his clerks are having trouble in the salons, or perhaps need help with the computers or customer service.
The cameras connect through the high-speed wide area network to Asmar’s home office, where he has a high-end workstation with dual monitors displaying camera data in real time, all the time. Surveillance data is also stored on the home office server, in case it is needed at a future time.It is an efficient, cost-effective solution for store security and monitoring.
“Before hiring Tech Experts, our network would sometimes go down, run slow, and we’d sometimes run into just weird problems we couldn’t figure out,” said Asmar. “Since signing up on their network maintenance plan, we haven’t had any network problems. We also upgraded our systems to a wide area network, linking up all of our salons — we couldn’t have done that without Tech Experts help. I’m VERY glad we hired these guys to support our systems.”