By Insight Editor / 29 Apr 2023 / Topics: Consulting services Networking
Facts at a glance
Client industry
Wholesale food distribution
Challenge
Modernize the network and improve availability across 140 facilities
Solution
An all-new network to achieve 99.95% uptime — deployed and installed at scale
Insight provided:
- Network site design and planning
- Full-scale network deployment and installation
- Post-deployment test results, updated wireless and network diagrams, and site inventory
Insight services:
- Professional Services
- Lifecycle Services
Outcomes:
Download the client story
- Improved experiences across 600,000+ customer base
- 99.95% network uptime across all aspects — LAN, WAN and wireless
- Zero severity one outages since engaging Insight
- Wide-scale network modernization across 140 facilities
There are many reasons why food distribution has grown to a $208 billion industry. One of those reasons is strategic technology transformation.
This global leader in wholesale distribution serves more than 600,000 customers across the nation. The mission: to deliver top-tier products on time as efficiently as possible — with the network powering back-end operations. But with the company’s network infrastructure nearing end-of-life status, its director of network services saw an opportunity: to create competitive advantage by modernizing the network, which would align with the business’s growth strategy.
“My goal is to build the highways and byways — the underlying infrastructure — to support growth strategy,” he says. “We’re expanding into the cloud. We’re fortifying security We’re working smarter and not harder. And our network is a critical piece of that plan.”
With 140 locations to modernize, the company didn’t just need a physical network replacement. It also needed a strategic plan to execute at scale, with as little interruptions as possible. That’s where Insight came in.
Insight’s team went to work, surveying across cabling, wireless, power and electrical sites. Our teams deployed and installed all network components — from wireless to routers, switches and cabinets.
Insight’s director of services reflects on the massive scale of the installation: “The facilities go on for a mile in size. Some of them have sub-zero freezing temps. Our networking teams wear environmental suits to do the installs with 15-minute windows before their laptops can freeze up. It’s a challenge we’ve welcomed with open arms in order to build the groundwork for this client’s ongoing transformation.”
Post-deployment, Insight’s teams provided the company with updated test results, wireless and network diagrams, and inventory, ensuring peak visibility and measurable progress.
Since engaging Insight, the business has not experienced a single severity one outage, and has achieved network uptime of 99.95%. That’s less than a minute of downtime per day — a number that will continue to decline as modernization efforts continue. Today, the client’s wireless network powers a massive fleet of forklift vehicles picking and loading palettes onto trucks, 24/7.
“We have very short intervals of time to have orders out the door for delivery,” says the client’s director of network services. “99.95% uptime capabilities mean we can pull product all night long. We can load our trucks and get them out the door in the early hours of the morning to deliver to our customers on time. We have multiple facilities that do over a million cases a day. This has been a game changer.”
He adds, “Insight built the foundational pathways that unlocked new data center capabilities for us. We have since installed new data centers interconnected directly into the cloud at four to five milliseconds away. The efficiency gains will be massive for our organization.”
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