Series on Next  Gen NBN adoption

Mr Goh Zhi Xian: Transactions are much faster, the system no longer hangs, and we do not encounter any more drops in connection.

Connections that got cut off when it rained, access speeds that slowed to a crawl during peak hours, – these were some of the connectivity issues that Drilmaco used to contend with when employees from remote sites tried to access its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Today, with the Next Generation Nationwide Broadband Network (Next Gen NBN) in place, the crawling bit rates and dropped connections have now become a thing of the past.

Drilmaco was incorporated in 1997 to provide machining services to major material suppliers in Singapore. Since then, its customer base has grown to encompass manufacturing and service companies in the oil exploration and related industries. In 2005, a fabrication division was set up to manufacture subsea structure and semi-finished equipment used in oil exploration and production. Drilmaco also has a plant in Johor where it also carries out machining and fabrication activities.

In all, the company has about 200 employees, about 150 of whom are based in Singapore and the rest in Johor. Many of them - whether they are in sales, purchasing, inventory or production - make use of a remote desktop connection to access the company’s ERP system for various transactions. These include generating and recording sales orders, tracking production jobs and issuing delivery orders and invoices.

Initially, the company was using a virtual private network (VPN) service over an ADSL link to support its users in these inter-site transactions. On average, there would be about 18 users linking in from remote sites. Close to 1 GB of data transfers took place every day, including emails, said Senior Group IT Engineer Mr Goh Zhi Xian.

The connection, however, was very slow. “We would get complaints from users about the speed,” said Mr Goh. “Although we could get 3 Mbps for downloads, for uploads it was only 768 kbps.”

The upload speed was important because data had to be pushed up from the server at the other end of the connection, Mr Goh explained. “If this was slow, there would be a bottleneck and even if the user had a fast download connection at his end, the overall experience would be that the system was slow.”

The situation was particularly bad during the peak period between 4 pm and 4.45 pm, when the sales people started entering their sales orders at the end of the day and the production work orders had to be sent to the workshop. “The system would slow down just when everybody was looking forward to going home,” said Mr Goh.

To make matters worse, the users experienced frequent loss in connection, especially when there was a storm. This meant having to spend time re-connecting to the server.
In an attempt to speed up the performance of its network, Drilmaco invested in a bandwidth accelerator which cost S$9,000 and had an annual maintenance fee of S$6,900. However, this increased the throughput only to 1 Mbps. “It was ridiculous,” said Mr Goh. “Why pay so much if it can only push the performance to 1 Mbps?”

In June 2012, Drilmaco decided to switch over to the Next Gen NBN to address these issues, and deployed a Layer 2 VPN over the 10 Mbps fibre connection. The service from Zone Telecom, which comprises the Next Gen NBN connection and two Layer 2 VPN links, worked out to S$1,850 a month. In comparison, the previous ADSL/VPN solution cost S$2,250 a month.

Another immediate cost saving came from not having to deploy a bandwidth accelerator, as the Next Gen NBN link was able to provide Drilmaco with 10 Mbps symmetrical upload and download speeds.

The performance enhancements and greater stability of the Next Gen NBN have also resulted in improvements in productivity and efficiency for the company. “Transactions are much faster, the system no longer hangs, and we do not encounter any more drops in connection,” said Mr Goh.