Company background:
Accolade Wines recently sold its award-winning manufacturing and warehouse facility, The Park, to bottling and distribution business, Encirc. Encirc will continue to support Accolade’s flagship beverage brands for many years to come.
As part of the sale, Encric inherited Accolade’s Dispatcher WMS. ModernLogic was engaged to migrate Dispatcher from Accolade Wines’ hosting partner to ModernLogic’s Managed Service hosting on AWS utilising the RDS and EC2 workloads .ModernLogic’s Managed Service will provide 24×7 Support to the operation and keep Encirc safe and secure using the AWS security tools and best practices for years to come. Encric’s challenge was its complicated architecture, thanks to its automated vehicles that service the picking and warehousing processes.
Our solution:
Against the clock
In a warehouse environment where there is a high level of automation servicing a manufacturing process, limited downtime is key. The automated vehicles in The Park need to be active in the warehouse as close to 24-7 as possible so it was difficult to find downtime windows during the validation phase of the project.
Design sessions were held during the planning phase of the project to map the best process of migrating the Dispatcher configuration and data to the new environment. We were also advised on any network trickery in the background to ensure that downtime was limited during the go-live phase.
We had about three months to test the environment. Then we had just a small 8-hour window to migrate to the new environment which included moving all of the data across, turning the solution on and making sure that it was production ready. We managed to complete the migration with about 10 minutes to spare.
Teamwork
Despite the complexities of the project, everyone was working towards the same goal and the power of teamwork really carried the migration through. Accolate Wines, Encirc and ModernLogic each had different roles to play but approval layers were managed efficiently and swiftly. We all worked together to keep the project on track.
There were a lot of people in the background supporting the project but to the end-user, it was like nothing had happened. One worker clocked-off his shift on Sunday night and logged back in on Monday morning and his machine just worked. No one noticed that we’d lifted an entire application from one hosting provider and moved it another. We count that as a massive success.
Testimony from Tom McGrath – Head of IT Services Accolade Wines
“I cannot express enough how seamless the ModernLogic team were. Four weeks into the project, I realised I needed to shut up and let the experts do it. And I’d just dip in and give a process or business review where it was required. It was as seamless as I could have hoped for, and I can’t express enough that I have not had a partner as good as Jon and Matt and all the team. They were impeccable.”
“We had a couple of hiccups along the way – some lower-level network and system issues – but the ModernLogic team got on the phone straight away to educate us and work with us to bypass the issues. We were able to get through them in a calm, efficient and process-driven manner together and still hit our deadline. It was amazing and really refreshing to work with people who really knew what they were talking about.”
