Global Manufacturing Company: Infrastructure Network Upgrade

Challenge

In November 2018, a long established, world leading global consumer goods and manufacturing company made the decision to invest significantly in their core network due to an inconsistent end user experience in a number of their locations across the globe. It was evident that network performance, speed and capacity needed to be improved to maintain a competitive advantage and to support the company's growth strategy.

Many of their locations suffered from areas of poor Wi-Fi coverage or indeed pockets of zero coverage, which hampered employee productivity and output. The company started planning this multi-year effort for a global Infrastructure Network Upgrade Program, focusing on improving their end user's experience within their businesses.

Choosing the right partner in WWT

Our customer conducted an extensive and rigorous RFP exercise to evaluate which global partner would be best placed to deliver on their requirements and to deploy at scale, velocity and quality. WWT's proven track record in delivering complex infrastructure programs for global financial and enterprise customers enabled us to return a response which assured our client that we would be able to meet and even exceed demands.

The customer realized that WWT was uniquely positioned to deliver successfully, due to the depth and breadth of their global infrastructure practice and their global coverage model of subject matter experts, which is bolstered with the support of our extensive partner ecosystem. 

The right partner had to execute to exacting standards and methodology, yet equally needed to be flexible to meet the changing demands of their business. This is where WWT comes into its own.

Solution

WWT was chosen to deploy initially at 50 sites globally. As the global deployment ramped up, it became evident that WWT's programmatic approach and focus on continuous service improvement (evolving the deployment model to take into account of lessons learned through each implementation) enabled improvements throughout each successive phase of deployment and site migration.

Equally, it was evident that WWT's core values, a key foundation of our Integrated Management and Leadership framework (IML), which characterizes the company's people and performance, was closely aligned to our customer's own corporate principles. This enabled an incredibly strong partnership to develop with WWT, our customer and their respective partner organizations — building trust and working together in harmony to achieve and improve results.

UK plant HQ deployment

In a normal world, delivering complex infrastructure projects successfully presents a significant challenge. In August 2020, when faced with the constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic, the challenge intensified when the customer's infrastructure network deployment at their UK HQ Plant truly put WWT to the test.

Deployment scope

• 1 x MDFs & 6 x IDFs replacing 10 cabinets
• 400 seats
• 120,000 sq feet over 2 floors
• Increased Wifi coverage - 58 x new Access Points (28 additional APs after cutover)

Going into this cutover, we had extensive experience of deployments within this program, with 12 sites having already been deployed across the global footprint. It was as final preparations were being planned in the run up to the cutover — WWT's Command Centre was on standby, ready to provide remote migration support — that the team realized that they needed to pivot swiftly.

WWT had completed a deployment in Germany the previous weekend, working in close proximity with our customer's employees. News emerged of a COVID-related incident at that site and the possibility that our team may have been exposed to the virus. With our engineers already en route to the UK HQ to perform the pre-work for the deployment, the difficult decision was made to cancel the weekend migration work. This was a huge blow, as the UK HQ deployment date had already been rescheduled due to the impact of COVID-19, but naturally it was agreed that employee's safety and well-being must come first. 

Despite the scale of the site and the complexity of the logistics and resourcing that needed to be rearranged, WWT was able to re-plan the deployment within two weeks. The rescheduled cutover was completed in two days and was a huge success, without disruption to production services.

Enabling transformation 

This quotation from the customer's UK team really underscores the importance of our partnership with them, of which we are truly proud:

We look forward to continuing the customer's journey across the globe. Explore your unique wireless and adoption requirements by requesting our Next-Gen Wireless Workshop.