Supporting growth aspriations with new ICT Infrastructure.
Key points
About UCC Coffee
UCC Coffee UK & Ireland has grown into one of the leading coffee companies in the industry. In the last 20 years, its ICT infrastructure was being outpaced with business growth.
The challenge
UCC Coffee’s ICT infrastructure had been incrementally improved and ‘patched’ over the past 20 years, as the company grew from a small base. However, the ICT infrastructure was being outpaced as the business maintained a fast growth rate through the same period, and there was a risk of operations becoming impaired if a fully integrated ICT succession plan was not implemented.
Adam Cove, head of information technology at UCC Coffee UK & Ireland (2020), explained: “We had outgrown our ICT infrastructure. It was dispersed across multiple sites and we were unable to fully utilise the latest collaboration tools, which had the potential to stifle business growth – this was unacceptable to our business.
“Following a comprehensive tender it became clear that our incumbent service provider was unable to introduce a scalable enterprisewide solution along with new hardware, and we needed a fresh, dynamic alternative. The protection of data and the futureproofing of our platform were paramount. This meant that high performance networks with recovery systems, and the latest ICT software were a necessity to support our business and our ambitions.”
“Annodata was quickly identified as the correct partner for us long term and was awarded the managed service provider contract across all our UK and Ireland offices.”
“The service Annodata has provided has been such a success that it has been recognised by UCC Europe (UCCE) on a Pan-European level.”
Adam Cove, Head of Information Technology at UCC Coffee UK & Ireland
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The solution
Annodata delivered a comprehensive range of ICT services to UCC Coffee, fundamentally strengthening the company’s infrastructure and providing the Total Coffee Solution with the additional capacity it needed to continue to grow.
Annodata implemented new WAN and LAN solutions to provide a robust backbone for the company’s ICT infrastructure, and a new wireless solution to improve connectivity across all their offices.
“A key objective for this project was to simplify and improve our communication and collaboration systems,” says Adam. “We had been utilising multiple telephony systems, and we knew that a cloud-hosted managed solution would be the best way forward, so Annodata specified the Mitel telephony system, which provides VOIP services, instant messaging, video call capabilities, integrated conferencing facilities and a state of the art contact centre for our service team.” Annodata are a highly accredited Mitel provider with a long history of success in Unified Communcations.
Since the inception of the project, Annodata has migrated UCC Coffee’s ICT infrastructure to a Hybrid solution including on premise, Private Cloud and, being an accredited Microsoft cloud services provider, the Azure public cloud platform. The Hybrid platform was crucial in giving UCC Coffee the flexibility to scale its operation to manage peak periods, such as trade shows and promotions. In addition, UCC Coffee now has the potential to introduce new e-commerce and portal functions on its websites. The Hybrid approach offers UCC Coffee a flexible platform on which it can build additional services that the business may require as it continues to grow.
As part of their approach, Annodata seek to add value across the entire organisation. An opportunity arose to implement a new way to store and access its client database.
Adam added: “We held customer data on a CRM system that didn’t provide us with the tools we needed to use it effectively for our customers. Annodata specified an advanced CRM and business management platform, which we are now using to manage our customers and provide them with better information and reporting – analysing how they engage with us, and how we can support them further. By implementing a new CRM tool and a best practice approach we can also simply track business opportunities and provide visibility to the team. We have a level of clarity that pushes us to the next level.”
The result
Adam said: “Annodata managed the main pinch points across the infrastructure, before ensuring a seamless user experience, including standardised Wi-Fi shared between sites. Annodata has also implemented a 24-hour IT service desk, to resolve any ICT issues that our customers or staff are experiencing, efficiently and promptly.
We also recently integrated Office 365 across the business. This is yet another part of our business that Annodata has transformed, enabling our staff to use any of the applications that they need wherever they are, using any device. With the connected, collaborative foundations that we have built with Annodata, we can accommodate almost any request from the different business teams and build them the tools they need to succeed.
“Since implementation, Annodata has addressed UCC Coffee’s main concern about futureproofing our ICT infrastructure. Additionally, the service that Annodata has provided has been such a success that it has been recognised by UCC Europe (UCCE) on a Pan-European level. We hope to extend our solution further to capitalise on what we’ve built and bring in other overseas territories onto a UCCE scalable platform. This will help support customers on a Pan-European level.”
Adam concluded: “With a serviced, scalable platform for growth, we’ve underpinned the foundations of our business strategy, and have found a partner to support UCC Coffee’s growth. The improvement in our ICT infrastructure has led to an improvement in our relationships with our customers, as it has enabled us to provide a faster, more responsive and collaborative service to run our operations with greater efficiency.”
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