The Customer
The customer delivers more than 100-million meals to households across the UK each year. Their unique subscription-based service provides both fresh, pre-portioned ingredients and over 200 diverse recipe cards, inspiring customers to embrace the joy of cooking at home while keeping food waste to the absolute minimum.
Challenges
The nature of the customers' business, with high volumes of perishable goods needing to be delivered to highly dispersed locations across the UK within the most precise timeframes, places considerable demands on its systems and processes.
While the customer had already embraced a Cloud-native model, it increasingly found that its legacy Warehouse Management Systems (WMSs) were far too sensitive to fluctuations in latency, leading to errors in packing and labelling and negatively impacting warehouse staff's productivity. This, in turn, led to instances of late deliveries, spoiled produce, and inevitably, unhappy customers.
As a result, costly and time-consuming on-site deployments were required, in order to ensure seamless communication between its central office and five distribution centres across the UK. This, however, led to issues around scalability, as the customer's operations evolved, with an increase in online demand requiring the opening of new distribution centres.
As a result, the decision was made to engage with a trusted technology partner who would be able to create a standardised blueprint for the customer's technology infrastructure, encompassing Cloud, network, unified communications, and cyber security - all delivered in line with its unique operational requirements and with ample room to scale in the future.
The Solution
Based on an intensive period of consultation with the customer and its third-party vendors (including its WMS provider), Exponential-e designed and delivered a Cloud platform that would not only serve the immediate needs of its existing distribution centres in terms of performance, availability, and security, but also provide an agile, scalable foundation for the establishment of new facilities in the future.
This proposed solution encompassed:
- Further optimisations of the customer's existing Cloud infrastructure, incorporating several managed solutions, Dell HCI, and Dell Storage, with the capacity to support future AI-powered initiatives.
- The most stringent cyber security systems and practices inherent in the design, utilising multiple best-in-class platforms.
- Highly resilient, high-performance connectivity between sites, utilising AWS Direct Connect and Meraki LAN & WiFi, with Exponential-e's teams managing the on-site installation.
- True unified communications - powered by Cisco Webex, to ensure seamless cross-site communication and collaboration.
The final deployment was complicated by the onset of COVID-19 lockdowns, which limited Exponential-e's teams' access to the customer's premises when it was necessary for specialists to self-isolate, combined with Brexit-related disruptions to global supply chains, which frequently required alternative parts to be sourced at short notice. Exponential-e's well-established partnerships with multiple leading technology vendors proved critical here, ensuring components could still be sourced without affecting the designated launch date of each facility.
This new blueprint has already proven its effectiveness several times over, allowing multiple new distribution centres to be deployed with zero downtime and zero operational disruption. The resulting efficiencies and optimisations have already made a tangible impact on the customer's ongoing growth, with turnover increasing from £23m to £308m between 2017 and 2024.
Solution Benefits
- Consistent performance across six highly dispersed locations, with a standardised blueprint streamlining the process of opening new distribution centres
- Streamlined cross-site management of perishable goods, reducing food wastage and leading to a better customer experience
- A robust foundation for future AI-based deployments, further optimising efficiency across the entire supply chain and opening the door to true data-driven decision-making
- An increase in turnover from £23m in 2017 to £308m in 2024 - achieved without any downtime
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The Customer
A well-established leader in British hospitality & leisure, operating numerous world-class pubs and hotels across the country.
The Challenge
With the ongoing move towards a truly cashless, interconnected society, the customer's legacy connectivity was increasingly showing its limitations, unable to handle the growing volume of card payments made on a daily basis, or guests' growing expectations around interconnected systems and amenities – all of which place considerable demands on network infrastructure.
The growing need for a new network foundation was exacerbated by the impending PSTN switch-off, which would render numerous legacy connections unavailable. As a result, the decision was made to execute a full refresh of the network, ensuring it would continue to deliver the required resilience, availability, and security across 350 sites.
A key priority was achieving sufficient capacity to accommodate the most data-intensive applications – including cashless payments, online bookings, app-based ordering, and Sky TV in all rooms. This would need to be fully consistent across all sites, in all rooms, including in proposed future sites where the incumbent provider could not provide the necessary connections. The entire project would need to be completed in advance of the PSTN switch-off, taking into account the specific regulations around the wide range of heritage sites in which the customer operated – a fundamental part of its brand identity and guest experience.
Solution
Exponential-e provided the required connection between all sites in which the customer is active, adopting an altnet vendor-agnostic approach that utilised the optimal provider for each of the customer's locations, including its own enterprise-class network. Working closely with internal teams, a comprehensive roadmap was established, with priority given to key sites in order to minimise any operational disruption and ensure the entire migration could be completed in advance of the PSTN switch-off.
Exponential-e's teams also worked on-location at the customer's 150 heritage sites across the country, ensuring that all work was conducted in full compliance with the applicable regulations, helping maintain the unique beauty of each building.
With this new foundation in place, the customer was able to achieve its goal of minimising the day-to-day handling of cash, resulting in more than £1m of savings through risk and labour reductions, while simultaneously providing the resilience and scalability needed to drive further service optimisations and innovations, in line with its long-term strategy of focusing on premium experiences. In the months since, the customer has enjoyed ample opportunities to scale up operations, enter new locations, and seize new opportunities to further enhance the overall guest experience.
Solution benefits
- Sustainable cost saving in excess of £1m, all of which can be reinvested in further service enhancements
- A seamless migration from legacy infrastructure to a scalable, highly available, futureproof network
- Sufficient network capacity to deliver the interconnected experiences guests expect across 350 sites, even in the most remote locations
- An altnet vendor-agnostic approach, delivering the optimal connections to each site, regardless of location
- Network upgrades executed in 150 heritage sites, maintaining their beauty in line with all applicable regulations
- Minimised handling of cash in daily operations, reducing risk and labour costs
- Ample scope to implement further improvements to the guest experience, such as digital signage, app-based access to amenities, and smart-tech equipped rooms
We benefit very highly of the network redundancy we have in place with Exponential-e, it allows our business to remain connected so that all of our managed pubs and hotels can trade and take payments
Server & Network Supervisor
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Across the Hospitality & Leisure sector, more and more data is generated and stored than ever before, throughout every stage of the guest experience. From the initial check-in, to accessing amenities, and post-visit engagement, the modern guest experience is truly interconnected, offering hospitality professionals numerous opportunities to build brand loyalty and develop powerful USPs. It's a transformative time for the sector as a whole, but these growing volumes of data present an extremely attractive target for bad actors. We just have to look at the growing number of high-profile breaches in recent years - where the targets have been left unable to trade and forced to contend with operational disruption, financial penalties, and reputational damage – to see the potentially irreparable effects of such attacks.
It's no surprise that guests expect concrete reassurance that their data will remain secure throughout the duration of their stay and beyond. As a result, organisations across the sector are investing in their cyber security ecosystems, phasing out legacy systems in favour of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platforms that provide fully centralised control and visibility of highly dispersed sites.
The challenge here is that the right digital investments are just the first step towards developing a robust cyber security posture. As seasoned hospitality professionals will already be very much aware, when people and technology come together, great things happen. And it's the same with cyber security.
SIEM and SOAR platforms provide rich veins of actionable, real-time security data in the form of logs, alerts, and analytics. However, far too many organisations investing in such platforms fail to consider how this data will be acted upon, and how a real security alert will be managed. Indeed, in many cases, their internal IT teams simply lack the time and resources to do so - a situation compounded by the growing diversity of cyber security portfolios, where multiple platforms from different providers have been integrated.
This is where a Security Operations Centre (SOC) becomes essential. A world-class SOC combines skilled analysts, defined processes, and supporting technologies to monitor, investigate, and respond to potential threats in real time. Without this operational layer, the expected ROI of digital platforms all-too-often fails to materialise, and in a worst-case scenario, the lack of defined processes may even lead to a security breach going undetected.
However, for many hospitality providers, building and maintaining an effective SOC in-house can be prohibitively challenging, and so there is a strong case to be made for implementing managed SOC services, as many across the sector have already found. Here, trusted partners' own specialists provide round-the-clock monitoring and response, acting as an extension of internal teams. This approach allows organisations to develop a stronger, more agile security posture, while simultaneously enabling internal resources to remain focused on delivering exceptional guest experiences.
So, if you're in any doubt about your overall security posture - whether that's systems, processes, or both - don't hesitate to contact us. Based on a thorough evaluation of your existing systems and processes, we will work closely with you to design, deploy, and maintain a cyber ecosystem that fully supports your day-to-day operations, freeing you to focus on delivering seamless, exceptional experiences for every guest, every time.
A comprehensive overview of digital transformation for the entire Hospitality & Leisure sector.
- Building your guest experience on the right digital foundation.
- Ensuring your infrastructure continues to evolve with your business.
- Turning one-off guests into loyal, repeat customers.
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