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Electrik Beach

Tech Experts Keeps The Sun Shining For Electrik Beach

If the winter weather has you missing your tan, chances are you’d love visiting Electrik Beach, Monroe and Toledo’s premier chain of tanning salons.

Since we last profiled Electrik Beach, the company has added two new locations in Toledo, and updated their computers at all four of their stores. Company president Dennis Asmar keeps his fingers on the pulse of the company’s operations by using state of the art computer and network technology from Tech Experts.

“You can go into any of our four locations and tan,” explained Dennis, “ and our staff is able to review your account to make sure you receive the best service possible.”

Being able to use any of Electrik Beach’s facilities is accomplished through the company’s proprietary tanning management software. Using secure Internet connections, each store communicates with the central server, keeping each customer’s account information up to date.

The company recently upgraded all of their servers and workstations to the latest high speed equipment available from IBM. The company’s servers have super fast and highly redundant RAID 5 arrays, using drives that operate at 10,000 rpms. The speed difference between the old system and the new is remarkable.

“Fifteen or twenty seconds doesn’t sound like a lot of time to wait,” continued Dennis, “but when you have several clients waiting, it can seem like an eternity. With our new systems from Tech Experts, our client wait time has gone way down, while our customer service has gone way up.”

Downtime just isn’t an option for Electrik Beach, so Dennis opted for Tech Experts’ “Experts Total Support” service for the salons. With Experts Total Support, all of the servers, workstations and connectivity equipment are monitored for problems 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As soon as a problem is detected, a ticket is raised, and it is immediately checked.

“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 Dennis. “Since signing up on their support plan, we haven’t had any network problems. I’m VERY glad we hired these guys to support our systems.”

Visit Electrik Beach on the web at www.ElectrikBeach.com.

Local Tanning Salon Enhances Customer Service and Decreases Costs with Service From Tech Experts

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.”