Yearsley Group
The Yearsley Group leads the way in frozen foods through its two divisions, Yearsley Logistics and Yearsley Frozen Food Sales. Yearsley Logistics is the UK’s largest logistics service provider operating in the frozen food sector, collecting, storing and delivering throughout the UK, while offering ambient, chilled and freight forwarding solutions.
Yearsley Group
Yearsley Frozen Food Sales sells branded and own-label frozen foods to wholesalers, retailers, caterers and institutions, which includes imported frozen foods and a range of innovative frozen products. To remain dynamic the company uses the latest technology to move rapidly with new products, or react to the changing needs of a fast-moving business.
The challenge
Over the last few years the Yearsley Group has consolidated its core business systems in a central data centre, reducing hardware and infrastructure costs, and the burden of administration. However, it’s existing network was becoming a bottleneck, with slow connection speeds hampering productivity, while a poorly managed service and limited manual resilience was having a negative impact on availability. What’s more, it was no longer the most cost-effective solution.
The Yearsley Group needed a replacement. The IT Systems team, under manager Chris Gillespie mapped out the kind of speed and connectivity the company would need for future plans, then looked for a provider it could trust to deliver them. The team decided on Zen for a number of reasons. Zen could provide the right technology and the right speeds at the right price, but it could also deliver the kind of managed service they required.
The solution
Zen designed and implemented a high availability Fibre Ethernet network linking Yearsley’s sites to the company’s disaster recovery site. Establishing speeds of up to 1Gbps provided true enterprise-grade security, together with Zen’s award-winning reliability and 24/7 support, the solution provided the Yearsley Group with reliable high-speed connectivity, eliminated bottlenecks and stabilised business critical systems available across all sites, all day, every day.
Zen also designed a high availability Firewall Cluster to operate within its IP VPN Cloud, providing an extra layer of resilience with near instant failover in the event of a problem. Together, Zen and The Yearsley Group set out a plan for implementation and migration from the old network to the new, with Zen providing project management and consultancy expertise. The project was completed successfully and on time.
The benefits
The new solution resulted in vast improvements in performance and productivity, particularly at remote sites that connect into the data centre. Systems connect to the network at over twice the original speed, and the improved connectivity has allowed for a greater degree of collaboration between teams. Internal and remote employees can work together more efficiently, while the in-house IT Helpdesk, and Programming and Development teams can now efficiently manage the whole estate. Chris Gillespie estimates a six-figure cost saving in productivity alone.
Meanwhile, the new solution has given the group the confidence to invest in new online technologies, further enhancing its business capabilities and providing even greater cost savings. The combination of IP VPN and Microsoft Lync are helping Yearsley’s work more efficiently between sites, and with customers and trading partners, allowing the company to embrace IP-based voice and video calls, together with remote training. The resulting reduction in CO2 is also helping the organisation achieve ISO14001 accreditation.
High connectivity speeds are one thing, but the Yearsley Group knows that with Zen’s Managed Support team, they can build their business systems on a robust, highly resilient network that can handle the applications of today, and those they want to implement tomorrow.
