To get the tastiest, healthiest produce, it’s imperative that fruits and vegetables arrive at their final destination without delay. As one of the UK’s largest distributors of fresh produce, Minor, Weir & Willis (MWW) knows this like no other. So when Rajinder Gill, Chief Financial Officer at MWW, concluded that an unreliable IT infrastructure was hampering productivity and efficiency, delay was not an option.
“Every time our system went down, we were forced to process every sales order and every receipt manually. Productivity suffered.” Rajinder told us in a recent interview.
Upon close inspection, MWW concluded that its ERP infrastructure — comprising disparate servers and direct-attached storage that lacked a centralized view of logistics and distribution data — was unreliable and simply could not scale. As a result, downtime and data duplication were common and business users were making distribution decisions with information that wasn’t always current or consistent across the company.
To resolve these issues quickly, MWW turned to Synapse, an EMC Velocity Solution Provider, who recommended they try EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure including EMC VNX unified storage, Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) servers, Cisco networking and VMware virtualization technologies.
“Our IT people spent two months trying to piece together a new infrastructure, but the scope kept expanding and we never got to a final solution,” said Rajinder. “We then brought in Synapse and in 24 hours they provided a complete EMC VSPEX infrastructure design based on our requirements. The VSPEX infrastructure completely took away the pain of implementing a new infrastructure.”
Fully implemented in less than four weeks, the VSPEX infrastructure runs MWW’s new Microsoft Dynamics NAV application for financials, reporting, supply chain management, and service management, among other operations.
“EMC proved that we don’t need to be a huge corporation to use premier technologies from EMC, Cisco and VMware. It gives us the flexibility to choose the technologies we want at an affordable price and they work together fabulously. And the best bit was that the VSPEX infrastructure was so fast and easy to drop into our data center.” said Rajinder.
In fact, the VSPEX infrastructure was 30% less expensive than other solutions MWW evaluated. MWW expects to see a full ROI of their investment in just 12 to 18 months. They also have a more reliable environment that can expand as the company grows.
With all of this improvement, MWW is able to pursue new business opportunities more easily Rajinder told us. “VSPEX has enabled us to create our own private cloud that allows us to easily grow our infrastructure and has opened the door to continue to advance our infrastructure and incorporate backup, disaster recovery and business continuity solutions. We can simply roll out new capabilities to our clients that enable us to pursue opportunities in new geographic markets.”
For the first time, IT is seen within MWW as a valuable partner to the business rather than just a functional tool, and it is delivering higher quality business data and driving better and faster decision-making.
Hear more about MWW and their decision to go with VSPEX here:
Is your IT department seen as a strategic business partner to your organization? With the VSPEX infrastructure, it may be easier than you think.
