Making healthy meals accessible across the entire UK through highly scalable, high-performance Cloud infrastructure
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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