How OSM Piatnica Advances Digitally while Holding onto Traditional Values

The administrative district of Piątnica, located in the north-eastern outskirts of Poland, has a long history of dairy production which dates back to the mid-19th century. Today, OSM Piątnica's fresh, natural dairy products like milk, butter, kefirs, creams, yogurts, cottage cheese, or milk cocktails can be found daily in grocery stores across Poland.

While OSM Piątnica is holding on to traditional values, it is also one of Poland's most technologically advanced and fastest-growing dairy companies. In the last few years, the Regional Dairy Cooperative has expanded and modernized its factory in the village of Piątnica. The company's total capital expenditure value in 2014 was more than EUR 13 million – the money was spent, among other things, on a new cottage cheese production line and a fully automated high storage warehouse – a first of its kind in the Polish dairy industry.

Today the Regional Dairy Cooperative employs around 1,000 people in its manufacturing site in Piątnica and the second factory in Ostrołęka, situated 40 kilometers away. Both sites have recently deployed core and edge switches from Extreme Networks.

The task of modernizing OSM Piątnica's network infrastructure was handed to IBCS Poland – a leading supplier of IT solutions for optimizing logistics, warehouse, and sales operations, specializing in the manufacturing and trading sector. The goals of the project? The ability to efficiently manage the entire enterprise network, in-depth analytics of the occurrences in the network environment, and raising the overall level of network performance and security.

The project was split into two essential phases; first was the analysis of the client's expectations combined with the existing LAN and WLAN infrastructure audit. The second phase involved installing and configuring Extreme Networks core and edge switches, as well as the monitoring and management software. As part of the modernization project, IBCS Poland's technicians integrated the old WLAN with the new LAN, wrote the implementation documentation, and trained OSM Piątnica's IT team on the new network infrastructure monitoring and management system.

Building the network on new Extreme switches allowed engineers to establish reliable and secure connectivity between the company's separate locations. To reach the stated objectives, IBCS suggested the implementation of the Extreme Management Center (XMC). The solution is now fully integrated with the Cooperative's network environment, allowing a single pane of glass, end-to-end management of multiple sites.

It's also worth mentioning that the new environment has been designed and deployed in a fashion that allows its smooth and seamless expansion in the future. The scalable and flexible solution in place can be expanded at any given time based on the ongoing growth and evolving needs of the Regional Dairy Cooperative.