Bidvest Logistics, the preferred logistics partner of leading brands within the food, drink and hospitality industry, including Pret A Manger, KFC, Greene King, Nando’s, Pizza Hut, TGI Fridays, Pizza Express and Zizzi has continued to develop its relationship with Retail Assist through the extension of its IT Managed Services Agreement for a further 5 years.
Retail Assist has supported Bidvest since 2011 with managed IT support services, enabling internal IT resources to focus upon the core business and applications, whilst Retail Assist maintains the infrastructure and user systems. Retail Assist helps drive incident volumes down with their single point of contact IT Help Desk, which supports 600 staff members across 7 depot locations. Retail Assist works closely with Bidvest’s internal IT team and third parties to minimise any disruption to critical business operations.
Because Bidvest Logistics was so impressed with Retail Assist’s Managed IT and Technical Services, in 2015, a year before contract end, they were contracted for a further 5 years – a real reflection of Bidvest’s confidence in the service. Thanks to 24×7 support from Retail Assist, Bidvest Logistics is reaping the benefits of greater systems uptime, meaning guaranteed services to their customers around the clock; for example, servicing around 12,000 deliveries per week across their customer base.
Cindy Howarth, Director of IT at Bidvest Logistics explains: “The selective outsourcing model we have chosen allows the team here to concentrate on our core competencies. Although Bidvest is in the logistics sector, IT is a key driver of our business. Working with a specialist company such as Retail Assist allows Bidvest Logistics to retain a competitive edge by enabling us to be agile and meet the demands of our internal and external customers.
“The impact of the IT projects carried out by Retail Assist cannot be understated. For example, since upgrading Bidvest’s servers to the latest technology, our disaster recovery time has gone from 4 hours to just 15 minutes. This has had a very significant impact, and represents just one of many benefits we’re experiencing.”
Since virtualising Bidvest’s key server environment in 2013, Retail Assist has continued to advise and support Bidvest Logistics on numerous projects to standardise Bidvest Logistics IT systems across all sites, to improve performance and maximise productivity.
In a project to upgrade disk storage for increased systems performance, Bidvest’s warehouse management system, Minster, experienced a 40% decrease in the time taken to complete overnight scheduling, allowing the business to operate 24×7 warehouses due to the vast decrease in system downtime. Retail Assist has further supported Bidvest’s international expansion plans, implementing IT infrastructure and user systems at 3 new depots in Paris, Manchester, and Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire. Retail Assist’s shared service model provides a consistency of service delivered across Bidvest’s disparate sites – in the UK and France – meaning that every member of staff receives the same quality support.
Retail Assist houses servers for Bidvest Logistics at their Data Centre in Northampton and supports those replicated at Bidvest’s Head Office with 24×7 operations support, monitoring and disaster recovery.
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