The Opportunity
The Wensleydale Creamery is the only maker of Yorkshire Wensleydale cheese. Its cheese is handcrafted at Hawes in the Yorkshire Dales and has been awarded European Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) status.
Visitors can enjoy the Wensleydale cheese experience at its onsite Wensleydale Creamery Visitor Centre, which receives 250,000 visitors annually. Not only can visitors learn about the historic cheese in its museum, they can watch the master cheese-makers at work from a cheese-making viewing gallery, and sample the finished article in its much-loved cheese shop, plus choose from dishes featuring its wide range of cheeses in its restaurant and coffee shop too.
Wensleydale Creamery supplies all the major UK retailers and countless independent shops, as well as exporting its cheese around the world. The Creamery hosts an interactive website with an online store where you’ll find all your favourite Wensleydale cheese varieties and delicious hampers, which can be delivered direct to your door around mainland UK.
Wensleydale Creamery needed to upgrade their connectivity in order to work more efficiently across its two sites. An increase in bandwidth was needed to support day-to-day activities and the online shop. Reliability was also an issue and had previously resulted in staff having to drive the 30 miles between the two sites in order to access data at the other site when the connection was down.
The Primary site, located in a very isolated part of Yorkshire, hosts 50 users and 20CN technology was the only option available; the single line was slow and would only be able to offer up to 8Mb/s.
The Secondary site, hosting 20 users, needed an improved connection while it was essential that both sites be connected securely.
The Solution
PureFluid MAX2 was initially installed and provided the resilience required by the business at the Primary site to alleviate the issues being experienced.
It helped the business communicate with customers, suppliers and all onsite and offsite employees, as well as supporting the online website which delivers orders all over the mainland UK.
Two copper lines were aggregated to provide up to 16Mb/s download with each line acting as support for a quick fail-over. This was essential in such an isolated location and meant that the business could continue as normal even if there was a problem on one of the lines.
The Secondary site’s main requirement was an increase in bandwidth so a single ADSL MAX line was installed to provide this. To connect both sites, a new Cisco Firewall was put in to allow for the configuration of a VPN between both sites. It allowed both sites to communicate securely via a VPN ensuring reliability and using quality equipment.
Further support was provided by FluidOne to monitor when new technology became available. Wensleydale Creamery recently upgraded both solutions to further increase bandwidth and performance, after adopting PureFluid PULSE2 at the main site and Vox 20 at the second site bandwidth increased dramatically.
The Results
Installations have been completed on time and everything has been smoothly delivered with the switchover meaning that staff experienced minimal to no disruption. The result has been a much more resilient and secure network allowing the business to continue to prosper in its rural location as if it was in a big city. Employees have been able to work much more efficiently since the new network was installed and all channels of the business are benefitting.
“Christmas is always a busy time for us and this year the online store received more than 2,000 orders – its best so far. The new network meant that we were able to keep all information updated on the website, with the correct images, stock levels and timeframes for delivery. FluidOne has made processing orders much more efficient and all orders were fulfilled in time for the holidays,” said Sandra Bell, Marketing Manager, Wensleydale Creamery.
“ FluidOne supplied a good innovative solution when a lot of alternative suppliers weren’t able to offer many options. The switch over was smooth & the technical support is second to none if we do have any issues or queries,” said Sandra Bell, Marketing Manager, Wensleydale Creamery.
