Case Studies - Travis Perkins

Company Profile

Travis Perkins is a major player in the timber and building supplies market with over 1,000 sites nationwide, with a turnover of £2.85bn.

Travis Perkin's expansion plan includes organic growth, but is primarily due to a policy of targeted acquisitions.

Technical Infrastructure

Not a traditional EPOS environment - no server processing at over 800 Branches - all at Central UNIX machine

• All prices calculated in real time via multiple methods - e.g. size of order, customer profile, product promotion
• Online access to a central warehouse and stock management system
• Up to 80 people at larger branches, trading a product set of over 200,000 items
• Products can be provisioned via branches, or direct from manufacturer to customer site
• Maintaining connectivity is key to the business

Previous WAN = BT's fully managed MPLS with 128kbps 'tails'.

Driver for change = cost + deployment time to match acquisition requirements.

Leased DSL for Business At Work

• Cost Reduction - 50%
• Improved availability and performance
• Availability - 99.99%
• Latency - 25-35 milliseconds
• Resiliency - no single point of failure
• Disaster Recovery - accomplished within 1 hour
• Faster implementation of new branch 'tails' - 14 days
• Use of Voice Over IP
• CCTV roll-out - further cost reduction
• Better control over third party suppliers
• Full visibility of operational details - in real time

Client Testimonial

"Travis Perkins is delighted with Powergroup and their Leased DSL Service, which has proven to be the most robust and cost effective network we have experienced."

Frank Smith, Group Information Technology Director,
Travis Perkins

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