Gist ensures the delivery of millions of products with managed desktop and datacenter services

Customer challenge

Gist's IT infrastructure underpins the delivery of millions of cases of perishable goods every year. To minimise disruption to its customer services, Gist needs to ensure that its IT systems remain highly available. The growth and diversity of the company's infrastructure, however, was making IT support more costly and complex. To contain costs while maintaining service quality, the company decided to partner with an external provider.

Computacenter solution

As part of a five-year managed services contract, Computacenter is responsible for supporting 1,000 end user devices and hosting 200 virtual servers from its shared customer facilities. Computacenter's service desk handles around 1,400 requests from Gist users a month, which include incidents and changes. The managed service also provides Gist with a robust disaster recovery option for its datacenter to protect business continuity.

Results

The partnership with Computacenter provides Gist with access to the skills and resources it needs to effectively manage its IT infrastructure and safeguard service levels. The outsourcing contract has helped Gist contain IT costs and enhance business agility while ensuring the continuity of millions of customer deliveries.

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Customer profile

Supply chain solutions for perishable goods
Gist is a leading supply chain management company, with 5,000 employees, 40 locations and annual revenues of around £420 million.

The company specialises in chilled, perishable and other time-sensitive goods, and works with 800 customers across five continents. Gist's customers span a wide range of sectors, including grocery, electronics and gas, and comprise high-profile brands such as British Airways and Marks & Spencer.

Although the majority of Gist's operations are within the UK and Ireland, a third of its revenues come from further afield. The company, which is a member of the Linde Group, works extensively in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Eastern Europe.

Gist's goal is to continue to expand operations within its specialist area of perishable goods, while respecting its core values, which include:

• Customer partnership
  
• Excellence of delivery
  
• Constant innovation
  
• Focus on people

Business challenge

Maintaining quality of service while controlling costs
Gist transports hundreds of millions of cases of products across Europe each year. To manage such an extensive operation and ensure that goods are delivered within tight timescales, Gist's staff rely on a number of business-critical IT systems.

With the company's focus on innovation and today's economic pressures, Gist is continually introducing more sophisticated systems to enhance its services and increase efficiency. This ongoing evolution combined with the need for Gist's systems to integrate seamlessly with its customers' IT infrastructures have led to an extremely complex IT environment.

Due to the time sensitive nature of Gist's services, the company must ensure that this complexity does not impair IT availability or performance.

Mike Flynn, Business Solutions Director at Gist, comments: "Our customers have extremely high expectations and cannot afford disruption to their deliveries as this could impact their own customer base. We therefore need to provide our staff with bullet-proof IT systems to safeguard business continuity."

IT growth and diversity were making it increasingly difficult for the company's internal team to support the infrastructure. "Our IT support costs were rising and we were rapidly running out of datacenter capacity," adds Mike Flynn.
In order to maintain service quality while also enabling business growth and containing costs, Gist recognised it needed to partner with an external services provider that could offer additional resources and economies of scale.

Computacenter solution

Managed services based on proven best practice
In October 2007, Gist agreed a five-year managed service deal with Computacenter. As Mike Flynn explains: "We selected Computacenter as its team understood the concept of partnership and had a similar culture."

As part of the contract, Computacenter is responsible for supporting 1,000 Gist end user devices from its central service desk in Milton Keynes. Mike Hornby, Head of IT at Gist, comments, "Computacenter's service desk handles around 1,400 requests from our users a month, which include incidents, moves and changes."

In addition to supporting Gist's desktop environment, Computacenter also provides datacenter hosting for 200 virtual servers from its facility in Nottingham and remote management services from its operations centre in South Africa. All services are developed and delivered via Computacenter's Shared Services Factory, which means that Gist can take advantage of Computacenter's best practice processes and shared resources to minimise costs.

Delivering a seamless datacenter migration
Due to the complexity of Gist's infrastructure and the need to keep IT downtime to a minimum, migrating the services to Computacenter was a challenging process. Due to Gist's reliance on IT and business continuity requirements, the transition of the server infrastructure had to be completed in a single weekend.

"By taking advantage of the skills and knowledge of the combined project team and through careful planning, we were able to migrate the whole datacenter over the course of a weekend," comments Mike Flynn.

Gist's server infrastructure was already heavily virtualised, but the supply chain company took the opportunity to conduct a hardware upgrade at the same time as the migration to the Computacenter datacenter. This involved implementing new HP blade servers and a NetApp storage area network, which provide Gist with the reliability and scalability it needs to support its operations.

Computacenter's datacenter services also provide Gist with a robust disaster recovery plan, which involves transferring operations to a separate specialist facility in the event of a major incident.

As part of the contract, 35 members of staff were transferred from Gist to Computacenter via Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) regulations (TUPE).

Results

Reduced risk and enhanced business agility
The partnership with Computacenter provides Gist with greater visibility of its IT operations, as Mike Hornby explains: "Computacenter provides us with comprehensive management data so we have total transparency of service performance and can see at a glance if Computacenter is meeting its service level agreements."

Gist also has access to a wider range of skills, which is crucial to maintaining its increasingly complex IT infrastructure and supporting future growth and innovation.

Mike Hornby comments: "Although we have achieved a lot so far, we are still in the early days of our journey with Computacenter. We are now focusing on continuous improvement initiatives that will enable us to deliver more cost efficiencies and higher service levels to the business."

As well as safeguarding quality of service, the outsourcing deal with Computacenter helps:

Contain costs: Gist has transparency of current and future desktop and datacenter costs. Access to shared resources is also more cost-effective than recruiting internal IT specialists and investing in dedicated facilities.

Enhance business agility: The flexibility of Computacenter's model means that Gist can scale its services to meet the changing needs of the business.

Reduce risk: The new datacenter is based on robust technologies and is managed in an efficient and proactive manner, which will ensure continuity of Gist's supply chain and deliveries.

"Computacenter offers the breadth and depth of expertise that we need to manage our IT infrastructure and deliver high quality logistics services to our customers," adds Mike Flynn.