McElhinneys Department Store

Ireland’s Store of the Year 2015, McElhinneys Department Store is located in Ballybofey, Co. Donegal. McElhinneys is a family owned business operating from a modern 90,000 square foot building that offers ladies fashions, menswear, lingerie, home and living products, cosmetics, children's clothing, footwear and bridal rooms - all conveniently located under one roof.

The business has been a customer of Digatech since 1998 and during that time, has seen immense changes.

Supporting McElhinneys growth through years of constant change – from EPOS to Office 365

Digatech provides a complete IT support service to McElhinneys and over the years this has seen the business embrace new technology to enhance the customer experience and improve efficiency.

The first major transition was the move to HP electronic point of sales (EPOS) systems and this was followed by other innovations such as server virtualisation, VPNs and moving to Office 365. Digatech provide long term IT support to everything from the point of sales devices, to printers, PCs, Network Infrastructure and managed anti-virus services.

Network Infrastructure Overhaul

The largest project of recent years was a full comms room and network infrastructure overhaul of the entire building, to enable a refit with the latest generation CAT 6 cabling. The new network provides a fibre link between each floor of the building a comms room.

The benefits of the new infrastructure are speed, removed bottlenecks, no downtime on the network, gigabit connectivity. The chosen technology platform for the switches was TP Link.

The network was also fully re-fitted to be able to deliver high speed WIFI throughout the store. CISCO Meraki switches and Krone cables were key components of the rest of the solution.

The entire project took three months’ end to end and cost approximately €200k.

Enabling better security

The new network infrastructure has enabled McElhinneys to roll out a state of the art CCTV system with 200 cameras throughout the building. The benefit to the business in theft reduction has meant that the project paid for itself very quickly.

Digatech also provided and supports the server infrastructure that underpins the McElhinneys ecommerce web site, www.mcelhinneys.com which trades globally 24X7.

Shane Lafferty, IT Systems Manager of McElhinneys said, “Digatech has been our trusted technology advisor since 1998. In that time the technology landscape has changed dramatically and the challenge of keeping up to date has been a challenge for every business. We are one of the leading retailers in Ireland and we need IT to help us maintain excellence in delivering top quality customer experience. Digatech have always helped us to make good decisions at every turn to ensure we’re buying only what we need and what will deliver real value to the business. They don’t believe in technology for the sake of it and provide total support to us, whenever we need it.”