The Gregory Group: Open road ahead thanks to Zen’s SD-WAN
- Sector = Logistics
- Zen Product = SD-WAN
The Gregory Group
Founded just after the First World War, the company now operates 50 sites from Scotland to the Southwest of England across four main brands,employing 3000 people and generating revenues of £390 million.It remains a proudly private business, with chief executive John Gregory the third generation of the Gregory family at the helm. He leads an end-to-end logistics operation. The Gregory Group is a third party logistics provider with a century of service and a nationwide presence. Gregory Group companies handle, store and distribute a wide range of products in the most efficient way. They meet the logistics needs of everyone from major high street brands to global food and beverage businesses, and also handle more specialist operations, like collecting milk from 2000 dairy farms. A century of success is testament to a business that is always looking forward.
The challenge
“Customers expect our business to be fully technologically enabled,” says Liam Jordan-Martin, Head of Technology for Gregory Group. “Everything from planning truck routes to telematics and tracking is handled by a transport management system. We also have a warehouse management system, alongside all the solutions and applications required to manage a highly dispersed modern business. It all takes serious bandwidth.” Today, looking forward means utilising the very best technology. Modern logistics is a fast- paced business. Major customers expect a partner that can mobilise quickly and operate, when required, with “just in time” efficiency. It had become clear that the company’s previous connectivity solution - a centralised MPLS - no longer had the capacity or flexibility to serve a multi-site business with a growing number of remote workers and an increased reliance on the cloud. The result was stuttering Teams’ calls, struggling applications and clunky workarounds to connect new or remote sites. The system was a management and security headache and a barrier to Gregory’s digital transformation.
The solution
The Gregory Group needed a faster, more flexible and more resilient networking solution, backed by a committed and bespoke service. “We chose Zen for both technological expertise and an excellent service wrap,” says Liam. “Another factor was that Zen has its own network. We talked to several providers that could support SD-WAN, but who bought the actual connectivity from a range of ISPs. We wanted someone who could provide end-to-end ownership of the solution.” The two businesses worked together to create an implementation plan. Individuals from relevant teams formed strong collaborative relationships, with engineers and infrastructure specialists talking directly to each other. “We established such an efficient working rhythm that site switchovers happened with hardly any downtime,” says Liam. “In fact, there was so little disruption that most of our people didn’t even know the deployment had happened.” “We chose Zen for both technological expertise and an excellent service wrap.”
- Liam Jordan-Martin Head of Technology, Gregory Group
The outcomes
The results have been game-changing for the Gregory Group, from smooth and uninterrupted video conferencing to a general sense that connectivity has become a facilitator of progress rather than a brake on it. “We don’t want capacity to restrict our people’s ability to use technology to its fullest extent, and now we have plenty of headroom for whatever the future brings,” says Liam. “From my perspective, the benefits are also about ease of management and being able to get sites on and off the network quickly.” Small, remote or new sites are able to run 4G or Starlink connections that are integrated seamlessly into the SD- WAN network and managed centrally
- no workaround required. Built-in redundancy has hugely improved network resilience. Bottlenecks have been removed, increasing the speed and responsiveness of their cloud- based applications. Perhaps most importantly of all, SD- WAN from Zen has given the Gregory Group the freedom to keep looking forward. “We don’t feel constrained anymore,” says Liam. “Connectivity no longer holds us back.” Here’s to the next 100 years.
