Forrester Sales Ltd

Forrester’s is one of the leading UK manufacturers of cooked and raw chicken. At their site in Kingsley, Cheshire they product Fresh, Frozen and IQF chicken portions as well as Steam, Roast and Marinated Cooked Chicken portions. Forrester’s customer base comprises of multiple nationwide supermarkets, foodservice, pub retailers, manufacturers and catering firms. Established in in 1972 it is one of the most established firms of its kind in the area and has an annual turnover of almost 70 million.

The Challenge...

Forresters were growing fast. They were having both performance and massive reliability issues with their network. The main challenge was to stop interruptions in the IT network onsite and make sure their critical databases were kept online 24/7 and highly available. They were losing expensive production time in the factory and the office side of the business were also working inefficiently due to an out of date IT system.

Stabilisation of Network

Whole new IT Infrastructure including replacing all servers, networking switches, firewalls and Wi-Fi

Enhanced network security

SIEM installed to monitor security incidents remotely. Out of date software and hardware replaced and legacy systems secured

Mobile Device Management

MDM installed for all Apple, Android Devices both on site and offsite to keep devices secure and up to date

Installed a highly available network infrastructure

All network infrastructure designed and set up so that there was no single point of failure on the network

Rolled out Cisco family of networking and security products

Cisco Meraki Wi-Fi installed covering the whole site, inside and out

Automation of business processes

Sales order automation implemented with OCR technology using a bespoke software program. Smart devices around the factory connected to main databases systems and alerts set up to be sent to factory staff.

catering for all industries

IT solutions for manufacturing businesses

When we started working with Forrester’s back in 2017 the IT systems there were out of date, slow and insecure. They were having constant issues with their main ERP system used around the factory and there was lots of downtime, which was completely avoidable. Having a stable and secure system for the 300 employees on the site is highly important and IT is used in all aspects of the business as of 2022 in all departments in the office and factory. Maintaining a 24/7 uptime is very important for the business and risks for cyber-attacks is great so also having a secure network infrastructure is important.

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Results

“RJH IT brought us into the 21st century at Forrester’s by implementing the changes required in order for us to continue to grow as a business. The insights we now have into the IT Operation are impressive. The benefits are now being seen all around the business. We now have a much better insight into what is going on in the factory in terms of production and can gain real time insight using our new Microsoft PowerBI Dashboards. The plan given out by RJH IT Services was clear and they were able to work around our 24/7 schedule causing as little disruption as could have been expected” Heidi - Managing Director.