Digitization and Cisco Spins Whirlpool’s Network

One of the best things about the Cisco initiative of “There’s Never Been a Better Time” is the way that businesses—and our world as a whole—are transforming for the better. With digitization, simple tasks that used to take a half hour are cut to just minutes. Allowing employees to work from home—and establish a better work-life balance—is also a part of that digitization transformation.

No company has shown that spirit of digitization more than the world’s largest appliance manufacturer, Whirlpool.

The company recently realized that the reason why their network struggled was because it was a hodge-podge of old and slow devices that was constantly breaking down. Whirlpool knew that they had to act quickly as the old network configuration was difficult to troubleshoot and became expensive to fix.

When they needed a modern upgrade, Whirlpool chose Cisco. With products such as Cisco Aironet 3600 Series Access Points, Cisco Catalyst 3750-X switches and Cisco Catalyst 2960 switches with 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Whirlpool was able to deploy a top-notch infrastructure that is centrally managed by Cisco Prime. The hardware and software work hand-in-hand to create a culture of digitization that has shrunk Whirlpool’s world, allowing for better collaboration and better communication company-wide.

After the network improvement, digitized endeavors began to roll out. One was empowering a mobile workforce. “People can go to any location, plug in a laptop and work like they’re in the office,” said Greg Fisbeck, Program Manager, Whirlpool Corporation. “And with a global IT standard, it’s much easier to run a transglobal business process.”

And Whirlpool’s new network truly spans the globe: the company has started a program to upgrade up to 20 locations per year from the United States, Europe, China, India and Brazil. There are 85 global sites to complete and Whirlpool’s key target is 99.99 percent availability. Fisbeck is confident that Cisco equipment will keep Whirlpool digitized for a long time.

“We didn’t want to have to come back in a few years and do another refresh,” Fisbeck said. “So we chose Cisco as our global standard.”

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