Kepak Group has become a victim of its own success when it came to its communications and turned to Three Ireland to provide a solution. Expansion at home and in the UK market saw the company grow to having 12 meat processing sites, one primary distribution centre and three office locations across the two countries.
Many of these sites had their own telephony systems, and contracts with several different telecoms or network providers. With minimal integration between the sites, an internal phone call from a Kepak site in Cork to another in Cornwall was charged at international rates. Furthermore, there was no consistency in the numbering format or user names between the various sites, and every time an employee moved, their extension number had to change.
It had become more and more difficult to maintain and support this infrastructure and it was decided to move to a solution where all sites would be treated as part of a single entity. There were also technology drivers forcing the issue. Several of the telephony systems were reaching the end of their working life, and this coincided with a decision by the company to use cloud technology more widely across the business.
“Kepak is a great example of a successful Irish company which has grown organically over the years,” says Karl McDermott, head of ICT and 3IOT with Three Ireland. “When a business grows at pace its communications solutions can get a bit out of control. You need to take a step back and look at what you would do if you were designing a system from scratch today. That’s what Kepak did. They figured out what they wanted and what the business needed. We worked with them and listened to them when it came to designing the solution, it was very much a collaborative effort.”
“Three invested a lot of time in understanding our back-end systems, so designing the solution came about organically,” says Eddie Johnston, group infrastructure manager at Kepak.
The project saw the combined Three and Kepak project team migrating more than 1,200 users across the UK and Ireland to Three Ireland’s hosted Cisco Unified Communications platform, which is built across multiple data centres. This provides the same communications experience for all users across all sites, regardless of where they are located. Three also provides managed internet access and managed firewall services to Kepak.
Cost savings
The new solution has also delivered significant cost savings. The single unified communications platform has delivered savings on call costs, maintenance and support. By consolidating multiple suppliers down to a single trusted partner, Kepak gained economies of scale and now only needs to work with one account-management team. Over time, the deal will also eliminate hidden costs of supporting old telephony systems in use at the different sites.
With a consistent infrastructure across all sites, Kepak has also improved technical support. “Local sites used to be independent from one another and couldn’t rely on support from team members at other locations. Now there’s more support across all sites, which is great to see. That’s the hidden part that’s hard to quantify,” says Jeremy O’Callaghan, group head of IT.
The new network is more resilient as well. The managed wide-area network across the UK and Ireland has diverse redundant links terminating in Three Ireland’s UK and Irish data centres. “The buzzword for the project was that we didn’t want a single point of failure on our network, and we have been able to achieve this without needing to use multiple vendors,” says Johnston.
McDermott points out that it was very timely to have the new solution in place coming into the Covid-19 pandemic. “It facilitated the reduction in travel and remote working where it was required,” he notes. “We deployed a lot of it in the first months of the pandemic. We were able to roll out all of the UK sites remotely from Ireland during Covid when we couldn’t get on a plane. We did this without any blips or interruptions. These are 24/7 operations and can’t have any service interruptions. It was an eye-opener for us to be able to do that. We worked very closely with the Kepak IT team on it. It was very much a joint effort.”
That partnership approach was critical to the success of the project, according to Johnston. “The solution was truly collaborative, as opposed to hiring someone and walking away. From a project management and delivery perspective, they have been superb, working through problems rather than dictating, and working with us as partners. Kepak is a family-run business with its own values. Three adapted their style of working to suit us. They’re a very good fit.”