Case Study: The Sleep Train Puts Network Issues To Bed

As the largest mattress retailer on the West Coast, The Sleep Train required one seamless secure network infrastructure to support their 233 store locations. Recent acquisitions, including the 2002 purchase of 54 Mattress Discounters stores and the 2006 acquisition of the 55-store Sleep Country USA chain, had left The Sleep Train's 1068 employees with a disparate network spread across seven providers.

With so many vendors to manage, the company's IT department was plagued with complex billing and service-related issues. When a circuit was down or when the retailer needed service for a new store location, The Sleep Train's first challenge was navigating through their many phone trees to determine their account manager du jour. Without truly dedicated account managers, The Sleep Train experienced an overwhelming lack of reliability and responsiveness. The retailer's accounting department also struggled with managing so many bills and, specifically, verifying bill accuracy.

"I would spend days wading through the various bills we had from our multiple vendors trying to make sense of what we were being charged for," recalls Marc Tseu, Director of Information Systems for The Sleep Train, Inc.