Enable Your Digital Transformation Goals
Entering New Markets
Our customer wanted to enter the European market. Clearly this started with just a handful of stores as they looked to test their proposition in a small, structured way in the UK. Finding good, reliable partners in unfamiliar markets can be difficult.
Hughes has the flexibility to support our customers at every stage of growth which is why we were able to not only turn around the delivery of service for the initial sites in rapid timescales, but we have continued to support our customer though their growth strategy so that we now deliver a managed service across 139 sites and two countries.
As our customer shifts their growth plans, we continue to work with them to identify the right solutions for their changing business needs.
Delivering New Technology
We’ve been supporting one of our customers for over 7 years as they’ve grown their business to 525 sites across 10 countries in Europe. Now they need to optimise that estate to deliver against their objectives for customer experience enhancement, productivity improvement and cost management.
So, we are helping them to pilot the latest SD-WAN technology to identify how best they can benefit from modernising their network infrastructure to help deliver their next strategic phase. In the retail world there is never a good time to implement new projects but our customer asked us to run the pilot during one of their busiest periods so they could complete the evaluation ready for the next financial year.
At Hughes we understand this. That’s why we designed the implementation schedule to be delivered outside of store opening hours so there was no impact on trading times even during our customer’s peak period.
Supporting Growth
As an innovator in their market, our customer had plans for initiatives to enhance the in-store customer experience, but they were aware that the success of these plans was heavily reliant on having a highly available, resilient network. The focus on the network enabled them to drive efficiency through standardisation and simplified management, enhance service availability to support in-store applications and reduce costs to ensure competitiveness. Complex question, simple answer It was the extensive experience in designing, delivering and managing optimised network solutions that led the customer to choose Hughes to provide a solution for their European operations.
Hughes proposed a managed SD-WAN as the best option. Hughes’ comprehensive service – including procurement of connectivity and equipment, deployment of onsite services and ongoing management of the estate – allowed the customer to outsource the whole process and ongoing management. Having previously dealt with multiple service providers for in-country support, this immediately reduced the complexity and increased the efficiency of operating the network. The fact that Hughes delivers services under a pan European SLA also provided the customer with predictability of service across their entire retail estate.