Briggs Equipment UK: New Company, New Wide Area Network

• A completely new network and service refresh
• A robust and highly scalable solution
• Efficiencies delivered through the centralisation of core business processes

About
Briggs Equipment UK is the country’s leading independent provider of materials handling equipment and services. It is the exclusive national distributor of Yale Lift Trucks, and provides short-term hire of forklift trucks, servicing and sales of used forklift trucks, including parts and tyres.

The company was formed in 2006 when one of the world’s largest private companies, Sammons enterprises, bought Finning Materials Handling.

The Challenge
The creation of Briggs UK (through Sammons’ acquisition of Finning) included acquisition of all the company’s UK equipment, customers and contracts, but not its IT infrastructure. The new company therefore needed to create a new wide area network (WAN) from scratch in just a few months to enable its five sites to work together and share information.

It was essential that the new network was up and running on time or Briggs UK would lose all connectivity—with enormous detriment to the business. As Chief Financial Officer Peter Jones put it, “The impact to the business if we didn’t get the network in on time simply didn’t bear thinking about!”

Briggs went to tender to find a network provider which could meet its stringent timescales and deliver a complete, reliable, scalable WAN along with necessary servers, security, email and internet access.

As a new business, Briggs UK wanted the solution to be flexible enough to meets its ambitious growth plans and to support new services and sites as the business grew. It was also essential that the new network would be delivered on budget.

Why hSo?
Briggs sought advice from an external IT consultant, who suggested that hSo should be one of the companies invited to tender, along with a number of other providers including Finnings’ incumbent supplier.

At the end of the tendering process, only hSo was able to meet all of Briggs UK’s requirements:

• Timing—hSo demonstrated that it could design and deliver the solution that Briggs UK needed within the tight timescale
• Flexibility and scalability—hSo proposed a tailored a solution that exactly met Briggs’ requirements and gave the new company the flexibility to change the way in which it used its new network or to add new sites, according to its business needs
• Budget—hSo’s quote was highly competitive
• Contract—hSo offered Briggs UK a flexible contract which enables them to add new functionality as they need it

The Solution
hSo designed a solution for Briggs UK based on two high bandwidth leased lines in addition to multiple DSL lines which delivered the connectivity it needed between its head office in Cannock (Staffordshire), and its other sites in Cannock, Birchwood (Merseyside), Liverpool and Livingston (Scotland).

The WAN provides high-bandwidth leased lines directly into the head office in Cannock and the Livingston warehouse, and cost-effective DSL connectivity for the sales office in Birchwood and the warehouses in Liverpool and Cannock.

The solution is based on MPLS technology—ensuring optimum levels of reliability, scalability and flexibility. hSo is one of very few providers to combine its own MPLS network with other Tier 1 carriers to create an end-to-end MPLS solution. hSo assures quality of service, with in-built traffic prioritisation and service assurance, ensuring that the network delivers exceptionally high levels of availability.

The Benefits
Briggs UK now has a reliable, scalable WAN that meets the needs of everyone in its corporate, sales and service areas of the business. The hSo solution has enabled Briggs to achieve business efficiencies by centralising key business processes. As Peter Jones explained, “We rely on our network as it enables us to perform core business processes such as ordering parts, scheduling service jobs and providing our customers with the high levels of service they expect from Briggs”.

Briggs UK is not constrained by its network and is able to introduce new services or add new sites to the network quickly and easily as needed.

The company does not have to worry about scheduled maintenance or fault resolution as the network is fully supported by hSo, with proactive 24/7 remote monitoring to ensure that any problems are resolved swiftly and do not impact the business.

Briggs UK is currently evaluating deploying Voice over Internet (VoIP) across its network to save on phone call costs and deliver other operational benefits—a development that will be able to be implemented quickly and easily over the existing network

To find out more call us today on 020 7847 4510

hSo, Epworth House, 25 City Road, London, EC1Y 1AA
http://www.hso.co.uk

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