- Case Study
- Leading UK Home Furnishings Retailer
Leading UK Home Furnishings Retailer
Case StudyAbout
Sudlows have been working with one of the leading homeware and home furnishings retailers in the United Kingdom, offering 50,000+ products and operating out of over 200 stores around the United Kingdom.
The Project
Our client operates out of over 200 store locations around the United Kingdom as well as office locations, mission critical distribution centres and home delivery hubs.
The retail group were keen to engage with a best of breed network equipment vendor and an elite installation partner with a proven track record of rolling out network technologies in retail environments.
Our client was looking for a solution that provided high quality, high reliability technology that could also deliver a major improvement to their network visibility and provide real context around user and device experience. Sudlows partnered with Juniper/MIST as an ideal technology stack for this brief and secured the roll-out project via competitive tender including a six-store pilot roll-out.
The full spread of services included the deployment of Switches and Wireless Access Points across the estate, wireless design for known troublesome stores, remediation of any cabling issues found and the installation of new fibre and copper cabling where needed. Sudlows were also engaged for further workstreams including the swap out of network cabinets and 4G survey works of backup cellular connectivity.
The project was successfully managed by Sudlows’ dedicated Smart Technology Team, led by Project Management with a proven track record of delivering retail biased roll-outs. Each store was completely migrated over a single night shift with Sudlows Engineers removing and replacing the legacy switches and wireless access points, fully repatching all devices and onboarding all wireless clients onto the new wireless network. Engineers held responsibility for on-site support on store opening and triaging and clearing any legacy issues found. The team completed multiple stores per night as part of a planned roll-out program across the UK.
In addition to the stores, Sudlows also completed wireless upgrade works across two live distribution centres including completely redesigning the existing wireless solution as part of the upgrade, deploying new structured cabling to support the new wireless design and then completing the migration from the existing wireless solution to the new MIST solution.
The Sudlows Smart Technology Team expertly managed the migration of the wireless solution for each distribution centre across a single planned 24 hour migration window including managing workload and information exchange over multiple shift changes to successfully swap out and make live circa 300 access points per distribution centre and work with our client to onboard all wireless devices back on to the new wireless network, followed up by completing a wireless exit survey to validate RF performance.
All office locations and home delivery hubs were also upgraded in a similar fashion thus finishing off an estate-wide upgrade of all wireless and switching equipment.
Following the success of the initial roll-out, Sudlows were further engaged by our client to deploy the same solution into a third new-build distribution centre, including the full design of the solution, installation and commissioning of all switching and wireless equipment and fibre optic infrastructure between the distribution switches and the access stacks.
Conclusion
In summary, Sudlows were engaged via competitive tender to support our client with a key technical refresh of their network. Sudlows took ownership of the project from start to finish including supporting all high-level and low-level design work, and wireless design and project management of the roll-out. Sudlows supplied and installed all equipment including circa 2,500 Wireless Access Points and 500 Switches across approximately 200 sites made up of retail stores, offices and distribution centres. Sudlows’ Smart Technology Team retained full ownership of the project including management of the roll-out schedule, team meetings, arrangement for access, security and managing all project related documentation.
Location
UK/National
Sites
200
WAP's
2,500
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