Brewers

A custom-designed mesh infrastructure environment now facilitates a truly diversified omnichannel shopping experience for Brewers’ customers in 195 stores across the UK.

The challenge

Brewers are the UK’s largest independent decorator’s merchant. Looking to go out of their way to provide professional decorators with whatever they need to deliver a fantastic finish every time, the team at Brewers were looking to streamline their services and provide an optimised in-store experience for their customers.

To achieve the highest level of service delivery, the connectivity specialists at Focus Group were tasked with creating a fully managed, bespoke mesh infrastructure environment, using Cisco Meraki SD-WAN, LAN and Wi-Fi.

The solution

The project criteria included the design, provisioning and management of secure in-store connectivity, including business broadband for highly available and resilient connectivity, delivered through a bespoke, full-stack Cisco Meraki infrastructure.

Deploying Brewers’ connectivity solution across all 195 stores in the UK required carefully planning each store's migration, ensuring they all had the strongest connectivity, from the highest-rated provider available in the area.

The new PCI-compliant SD-WAN solution was then integrated into Brewer’s existing MPLS network to create a faster, more agile operation for retail customers, suppliers and staff.

The resiliency of our solution proved its worth during project deployment when a disruption from the incumbent MPLS provider caused outages for all stores except those with our SD-WAN in place. Robust and reliable connectivity is essential for retailers to maximise trading and provide an exceptional customer experience, and so having ISP independence through our solution was critical for their business continuity.

The solution incorporated:

Bespoke mesh infrastructure using Cisco Meraki SD-WAN, LAN and Wi-Fi
Fully PCI-compliant network
Focus Group network managed service for the entire Cisco stack
Centralised management and configuration through the Meraki dashboard

The results

The new infrastructure has enabled instant configuration and seamless update integration without the timely and often costly process through the original ISP. The agile and easy-to-configure platform also provides a highly responsive network that can cope with fast service activation and provisioning, while delivering critical end-to-end cyber security and quality performance.

As a Microsoft cloud solutions provider and official Dell partner, Focus Group were able to provide a cost-effective and comprehensive package of fully managed services to Brewers.

"Focus Group act as a seamless extension of our team, and they've been invaluable in enabling us to make more intelligent decisions, making our future vision a reality."

James Cawthorne, IT Operations Manager

Brewers