Following a period of growth through acquisition, this organisation operated four divisions across approximately 60 sites.

Each division had their own WAN MPLS contracts and a separate security/remote access solution from a variety of service providers. The multiple service provider engagement had caused varied service levels across the group with some poorly performing sites. Management and monitoring across this diverse group of contracts was complex and convoluted.

Uncovering the root cause of faults and implementing fixes was time-consuming, and increasing capacity or making changes to the WAN was challenging. Even simple requests such as a change on a managed firewall could take weeks. The internal IT team was regularly managing issues, rather than working to support revenue-generating endeavours.

The business also operated in accordance with stringent regulations and directives. Any network outage threatened significant disruption to the processing line, causing unnecessary food wastage and incurring commercial penalties. The business recognised the need for additional bandwidth and resilience to prevent costly production suspensions, and the need to consolidate the twelve group-wide incumbent providers into a single, trustworthy network and security solution provider.

This would standardise their WAN making it easier to manage, simplify the associated WAN contracts and deliver cost savings to the business. An upcoming WAN renewal negotiation was the perfect opportunity to embark on a WAN transformation project. SD-WAN off­ered the efficiencies of a single, ubiquitous, and always-on WAN which would better suit the always-on nature of the business.

• Simplification: The network is standardised group-wide in a single contractual framework. It benefits from predictable SLAs and proactive monitoring and management without additional operational burden for the IT team.
• Visibility: All divisions have read-only access to the SD-WAN management platform which provides granular visibility of all traffic across the WAN. This has provided actionable insight that is already returning benefits within the broader IT teams.
• Resilience and Performance: Using multiple connections in active-active format ensures heightened uptime and availability. Real-time adjustments in application traffic flows and prioritisation also guarantee critical application performance.
• Security and Segmentation: Within a single SD-WAN platform, the divisions are virtually segmented from each other, enabling the Group to have ‘one network’ and benefiting from tightly controlled inter-divisional interactions.
• Flexibility: Adding capacity is now as simple as adding it to the ‘connectivity pool’ at any one site. Deploying new sites is quick and easy.
• Cost Savings: Kerv’s SD-WAN solution was designed and deployed at a significantly lower price than the suggested MPLS equivalent.

Following a period of growth through acquisition, this organisation operated four divisions across approximately 60 sites.

Each division had their own WAN MPLS contracts and a separate security/remote access solution from a variety of service providers. The multiple service provider engagement had caused varied service levels across the group with some poorly performing sites. Management and monitoring across this diverse group of contracts was complex and convoluted.

Uncovering the root cause of faults and implementing fixes was time-consuming, and increasing capacity or making changes to the WAN was challenging. Even simple requests such as a change on a managed firewall could take weeks. The internal IT team was regularly managing issues, rather than working to support revenue-generating endeavours.

The business also operated in accordance with stringent regulations and directives. Any network outage threatened significant disruption to the processing line, causing unnecessary food wastage and incurring commercial penalties. The business recognised the need for additional bandwidth and resilience to prevent costly production suspensions, and the need to consolidate the twelve group-wide incumbent providers into a single, trustworthy network and security solution provider.

This would standardise their WAN making it easier to manage, simplify the associated WAN contracts and deliver cost savings to the business. An upcoming WAN renewal negotiation was the perfect opportunity to embark on a WAN transformation project. SD-WAN off­ered the efficiencies of a single, ubiquitous, and always-on WAN which would better suit the always-on nature of the business.

Marshall Canada’s parent group, Marshall Aerospace and Defence group (MADG), have been successfully transforming through a programme called Horizon. Horizon have been implementing IFS as the ERP platform which underpins the transformation of the organisation.

To enable this, the Horizon Programme mobilised a separate project team, led by Kerv Consult to deliver this standalone ERP capability for the business. The goal was to align the solutions for both MADG and Marshall Canada as much as possible, whilst also ensuring that the capability delivered would meet the Canada specific requirements.

This was especially timely as Marshall Canada had historically been an Aerospace focused organisation, providing a range of integrated support and engineering services for aircraft. However, the Land Systems part of the business had been growing and the Marshall Canada have plans for a large new manufacturing facility which required a solid ERP foundation.

This new facility coupled with the requirement to avoid clashes with the delivery plan for the Horizon solution within the MADG UK businesses meant that the project was presented the challenged to deliver a full ERP capability within 5 months. This was a challenge that we readily accepted!

• Finance – This underpinned all accounting requirements as well as AR, AP, General Ledger, Tax and Financial Reporting.
• Project Management – This part of the solution covered all projects (both internal and revenue generating customer projects) including the specific project requirements driven by some of the defence contracts with customers.
• Order to Cash – This process allowed for sales to be captured and managed through to invoicing. We worked closely with the Marshall Canada team and were able to streamline this process to drive efficiencies at present, whilst also allowing more complex orders in future.
• Supply Chain and Procurement – The solution the project delivered underpinned all buying and supplier management for the company.
• Service & Maintenance – Developing the capability to maintain assets and fleets to underpin future contracts.

This was delivered on top of a robust technical solution which was integrated with other systems. There was an element of IFS functionality not deployed as it was not needed at this point in time, such as manufacturing. However, the project team ensured that it was readied and could be deployed in future without conflicting with the current solution.

We always advocating learning from experience and one reason that the solution was able to be delivered at pace is that there was an existing referenceable design, with a set of core decisions, which had been developed for MADG.

The team took the approach to base the solution design discussions against this reference and then only deviate where required rather than start from scratch. This allowed for the great work delivered by other parts of the Horizon programme to be re-utilised and this approach certainly helped achieve the timelines that we did.

• Simplification: The network is standardised group-wide in a single contractual framework. It benefits from predictable SLAs and proactive monitoring and management without additional operational burden for the IT team.
• Visibility: All divisions have read-only access to the SD-WAN management platform which provides granular visibility of all traffic across the WAN. This has provided actionable insight that is already returning benefits within the broader IT teams.
• Resilience and Performance: Using multiple connections in active-active format ensures heightened uptime and availability. Real-time adjustments in application traffic flows and prioritisation also guarantee critical application performance.
• Security and Segmentation: Within a single SD-WAN platform, the divisions are virtually segmented from each other, enabling the Group to have ‘one network’ and benefiting from tightly controlled inter-divisional interactions.
• Flexibility: Adding capacity is now as simple as adding it to the ‘connectivity pool’ at any one site. Deploying new sites is quick and easy.
• Cost Savings: Kerv’s SD-WAN solution was designed and deployed at a significantly lower price than the suggested MPLS equivalent.

We ran an aggressive delivery plan in which we launched 4.5 months after starting. We knew we had condensed timescales compared to a traditional ERP implementation and so we started with a clear scoping workshop to provide a backbone to deliver against.

We knew this needed to be validated and so the team quickly stood up a development instance of the system to allow people to see it in action. We then held a range of solution workshops to refine the scope and validate the solution, by walking through the in-scope processes within IFS and agreeing any changes or requirements.

In parallel, we kicked off the data workstream which is always critical in a project like this. By mobilising this very early, we were able to prove the process to load data several times before the final cutover and also support the relevant owners of the data to iteratively improve on the data loads provided.

The results are best articulated by our customer:

“Dan and the team worked tirelessly and this has ensured another key element of the strategic Horizon Programme has been completed.”

Alan Ashton, Horizon Programme Director

This success was testament to the great work done by the entire project team which we are delighted to have had the opportunity to lead.

“With Dan and Kerv Consult’s support we have managed to deliver a full ERP deployment to Canada in 4.5 months with only very few and insignificant post live issues. This was done in a fully remote mode, during the pandemic with a time difference of 8 hours.

Dan’s personal leadership and extraordinary efforts helped deliver a complex ERP solution despite the challenges of being fully-remote and across 8 time zones.”

Using a highly-collaborative and data-driven approach, the team from Kerv Consult maintained a high degree of stakeholder participation and buy-in throughout a compressed test and development schedule of less than five months.

Thanks to the comprehensive and transparent reporting style, I always had a clear view of the project’s status and full confidence in Kerv Consult’s commitment to deliver successfully.”

Sam Michaud, Managing Director Marshall Canada

Marshall Canada are now well positioned to grow their Land business and develop their manufacturing facility. They have a world class ERP system to underpin their growth and a talented workforce to leverage it.

The relationship between us at Kerv Consult and Marshall is also excellent and conversations have already begun about how we can support Marshall with other projects and change.

We look forward to working together into the future with such a fantastic organisation.

Following a period of growth through acquisition, this organisation operated four divisions across approximately 60 sites.

Each division had their own WAN MPLS contracts and a separate security/remote access solution from a variety of service providers. The multiple service provider engagement had caused varied service levels across the group with some poorly performing sites. Management and monitoring across this diverse group of contracts was complex and convoluted.

Uncovering the root cause of faults and implementing fixes was time-consuming, and increasing capacity or making changes to the WAN was challenging. Even simple requests such as a change on a managed firewall could take weeks. The internal IT team was regularly managing issues, rather than working to support revenue-generating endeavours.

The business also operated in accordance with stringent regulations and directives. Any network outage threatened significant disruption to the processing line, causing unnecessary food wastage and incurring commercial penalties. The business recognised the need for additional bandwidth and resilience to prevent costly production suspensions, and the need to consolidate the twelve group-wide incumbent providers into a single, trustworthy network and security solution provider.

This would standardise their WAN making it easier to manage, simplify the associated WAN contracts and deliver cost savings to the business. An upcoming WAN renewal negotiation was the perfect opportunity to embark on a WAN transformation project. SD-WAN off­ered the efficiencies of a single, ubiquitous, and always-on WAN which would better suit the always-on nature of the business.