Yarrows (The Bakers) Limited is a 100% New Zealand owned family bakery that has been proudly operating from Manaia since 1923. For over 25 Years, Yarrows has specialised in the manufacture of long shelf life, natural frozen dough products in addition to their nutritionally superior range of fresh breads. Frozen dough products account for 80 percent of the business and are dispatched to New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, United States, Dubai, Singapore and other overseas markets. New product development and innovation ensures Yarrows continues to lead the Australasian market in frozen dough manufacturing.
Yarrows manufacturing arms in Australia are The Original Croissant Gourmet Pty Limited and Yarrows The Bakers (Aust) Pty Limited, with Gilles Bakery Limited also manufacturing in New Zealand.
Yarrows is a 24-hour operation therefore it is critical that systems are available twenty four seven, 365 days of the year. Company growth was overloading the existing IT infrastructure and causing major problems for its Perth office.
The incumbent systems comprised a broadband connection from Auckland, and Perth with a Virtual Private Network (VPN) into Manaia (South Taranaki) via D-Link modems. The IT infrastructure that the organisation had in place could no longer deliver the required levels of reliability.
Yarrows Group IS Manager Lynn Arnett, says the situation was becoming untenable.
“It was like trying to run a multi-national company on home broadband. The server housed in New Zealand had the Perth office tearing their hair out due to speed, constant dropouts, lock-ups and down time. Running a 24/7 operation meant that every outage was costing us money. In fact it had become the company’s biggest IT operational expense.”
The challenge for Yarrows was to leverage existing operational capability while significantly improving network access for other offices and remote workers. For example the internal network at Manaia, with all users running on a terminal server, had to remain unchanged to ensure workers’ normal working day was not adversely affected.
Yarrows had already invested half a million dollars in Manaia, establishing a Linux cluster server infrastructure spread over three sites with contingency fail over as part of its business continuity plan. However despite this investment the international office continued to battle with an unreliable connection and quality because of broadband constraints.
Maxnet engineered a network solution designed to integrate with Yarrows’ existing technologies as well as allowing for changes in technology down the track. The solution comprised of a Wide Area Network (WAN) utilising Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology to connect several remote offices, providing the reliability required for day-to-day processing. It also allowed global access to the network for other remote users via the Maxnet managed VPN service.
Arnett comments; “We had previously encountered a similar network to what Maxnet proposed. They were running the same software packages, a similar Linux server and had operations in Australia and New Zealand but without any of the problems we were experiencing at Yarrows. This made the decision to run with the proposed Maxnet solution a lot easier as we knew it worked.”
Although Yarrows had no previous business relationship with Maxnet, Arnett says there were several good reasons to engage with Maxnet.
“We chose Maxnet based on their fresh approach, committed enthusiasm and flexibility with Yarrows requests”.
“Initially we sought quotes from three companies however, although there was little difference in the price, Maxnet provided the flexibility for the fast changing expansions we were going through. An additional benefit was that, rather than trying to tie us in to long term fixed contracts, they offered a twelve month review period to ensure our partnership was meeting our expectations.”
After a ten-month sign-off process, which Arnett says “would have had many other company’s giving up and putting us in the too hard basket,” the end result is that Yarrows now has a reliable, robust network in place. It has eliminated downtime that was previously costing the business dearly. With latency issues a thing of the past, the Maxnet solution has helped Yarrows increase resource efficiency and greatly reduced operational cost.
