There are many ways in which to characterise the city of Manchester, but looking to more traditional aspects, two stand out: water and bricks. The former is due to frequent rain, and the latter to the city’s expansion in the early 19th century that saw the rapid growth of its cotton industry, creating new, global networks of manufacturing and trade.
And even as the city transforms into the IT hub that it is now known for – hosting global tech giants – these 19th century brick factories and warehouses are still in productive use for office space, boutique hotels and manufacturing – like with Kingsland Drinks.
As the premier independent UK supplier of bulk wine and spirits, the company’s bonded warehouse faces obstacles to the running of the wireless networks its operations depend on – namely, those traditional Mancunian obstacles of water and brick.
Kingsland Drinks offers services such as contract packing, bottling, distribution, product creation, flavour development and catering to retailers and brands. It has evolved into an employee-owned business with more than 400 staff members.
Its wine and spirits production began in 1955, and the company lays claim to having pioneered many of the most significant changes in the wine industry: the first to pack bulk wine shipped in flexi-tanks, the first to bottle in screwcap, and the first to introduce environmentally friendly lightweight glass bottles.
To fulfil its requirements, the company has seven automated production lines with extensive capability operating 24/7. The production environment has a high reliance on the IT infrastructure to monitor and manage the movement of stock within the large facility. An IT environment offering high levels of reliability and responsiveness is critical to supporting current operations as well as furthering company growth.
The site is a testament to the general principle of IT networks that, while they are important, you don’t want to see them or know that they’re there – they just need to work, and that is a challenge for Kingsland Drinks.
While the company is celebrating its 70th anniversary in wine and spirits production, its history with manufacturing on its current site goes back 60 years before that. Parts of the production facility is housed in buildings that date back to 1895 and are constructed of thick brickwork containing iron.
In addition, the site has been battered by the Manchester rain since then, with certain parts of roofing and paintwork showing the effects. None of this makes it any easier to rely on more than 100 wireless local-area network (WLAN) access points positioned very high near the rooves in massive buildings.
Addressing lost time
Robust Wi-Fi across the bottling and packing zones across the site is essential to fundamental business operations. Three years ago, the company installed a Wi-Fi infrastructure to complement a new SAP business system. The intention was that all forklift drivers loading and unloading palettes of goods across the site would have a handheld scanner to move stock around by scanning it in from one location to another.
Yet due to several factors, the WLAN was failing and, despite being only three years old, the infrastructure was poorly designed and not fit for purpose. There were dead spots where the Wi-Fi signal was too weak or too unstable to maintain wireless connectivity to support the inventory application and there were frequent IT helpdesk requests.
Speaking to Computer Weekly, Kingsland Drinks IT manager Brian Polkinghorne says that the ineffective WLAN was hurting productivity and costing the company money. “The issue was specific to our business. The Wi-Fi failed us. As a result, forklift drivers had to dismount to find a PC and enter information manually. That cost us a crazy amount of time in manhours just moving stock about the site.”
Somewhat modestly, Polkinghorne believes that what Kingsland Drinks does and how it does it is not “high tech”, adding: “Our forklift drivers run around with an RF [radio-frequency] gun, which is Wi-Fi connected. We are still on Wi-Fi 5 because it wasn’t necessary to go Wi-Fi 6, as we’re only sending kilobits of information at a time.
“[The RF] guns are basically running Android eight or nine. So, they’re ‘dumb’, which is why we take it up a step and let the Wi-Fi do the management of the device as well, rather than let the devices do it themselves. We have Wi- Fi 5 [in the bottling, packaging and loading yard areas of the site], but we do have Wi-Fi 6 in the offices.”
The initial Wi-Fi deployment started with around 40 access points just before Polkinghorne joined the company, and he almost immediately added another 20 to that. Yet despite saturating the wireless footprint more, the company still had dark spots and places where people dropped from the network. One of the benefits of the SAP business systems is that it’s designed to always know where all stock is, hence the need for all the forklift truck drivers with an RF gun to get on Wi-Fi.
Whether unassuming or modest, Polkinghorne has a clear recognition of the responsibility on his shoulders to make the wireless network as productive as possible, even if he describes one of his key goals as “shutting up everyone out there from complaining”. The SAP system went live in February 2020 but then, recalls Polkinghorne, came all the complaints.
“Basically, what was happening is [on-site staff] were scanning and they were getting logged out, then they’d have to go into the office, sign into a PC and input what they’d moved. And they were doing that dozens of times a day. The time lost on that was ridiculous.”
A refresh on reliability
A new solution was clearly needed. While Polkinghorne and his team had an idea as to what was necessary, it also engaged business-aligned managed service provider Holker IT for its opinion on what a better WLAN architecture would look like. Holker has two main facets of business: one is being heavily focused on manufacturing, while the second is in education – essentially, connecting big spaces that have lots of people and lots of different technologies.
One member of the Holker team had previously worked with Polkinghorne, and so the company was asked to give its recommendation on the Kingsland Drinks upgrade and offer a different perspective from other suppliers who were potentially considered for the refresh.
Before it offered any quotes, Holker managing director Matthew Metcalfe and technical director Paul Taylor visited Kingsland Drinks to understand how it worked. They spent a week with the team, walking around to understand what the wireless problems were, why those problems were occurring and what this meant in terms of production.
“One of our key responsibilities is to solve problems,” says Metcalfe. “And [Kingsland Drinks] clearly has a problem that needed solving.”
Remembering how Holker assessed the technical requirements for the job at hand, Metcalfe notes that things were “simple”, and sometimes that is what a job really needs. “For the guys from the office spaces, [they need] Wi-Fi 6… but in the production areas, in the factory and all the way around, when they’re driving around with stack of trucks, they don’t need speed. What they need is for the guns need to be 100% reliable.
“The guns are old technology themselves. [The staff are] moving from one location to the other very quickly in an environment that changes constantly. One minute you have four trucks [in a loading bay], then you’ve got three trucks and then 10 trucks.” All of this potentially affects signal strength, and so a more dynamic solution was needed.
Having assessed what technologies would best fit the bill, Holker proposed a solution based on Allied Telesis wireless technology – particularly the deployment of its Channel Blanket solution.
The technology is designed to meet the requirements of Wi-Fi high performance and always-on access, to overcome network challenges such co-channel interference, and to give the ability for user devices to roam between access points. In short, it allows user devices to connect wirelessly to online resources and applications from anywhere.
Moreover, it is designed for real-world environments where access point radio signal patterns are hard-to-predict polygons influenced by factors such furniture – including trucks fully laden with wine and spirits bottles – and the material of building walls, such as iron-infused bricks dating back from the Victorian era.
Most Wi-Fi deployments work on a multi-channel basis where Wi-Fi 5 or Wi-Fi 6 access points operate on a range of fixed channels, with manual channel planning to avoid co-channel and adjacent channel interference between access points whose radio signals overlap.
As for roaming, as a device – such as an RF gun – moves from one access points to another, it must disconnect and reconnect to the network. In dynamic environments, such as that described by Metcalfe at Kingsland Drinks, loss of connectivity is a likely problem. The Channel Blanket solution offers a single-channel wireless architecture to create a single footprint of wireless coverage with reduced interference and increased connectivity.
Holker knew what technological road to go down. Yet another key element of the solution for Holker, and subsequently for Polkinghorne and Kingsland Drinks, was cost and management.
Metcalfe says: “You’ve got to remember, it’s going to be handed back to the IT team to do day-to-day management. Kingsland Drinks wanted [the solution] controlled from a on-premise controller, which suited us well.
“The benefit of the Channel Blanket is that you can just flood it. You can put 10 access points in and it just covers the space because it’s single channel. You don’t have the same worries of putting two access points and one dropping off and reconnecting to the other.”
The deployment was a lot more than two points. The factory now has 128 points running on one big service set identifier (SSID) for a network covering the inside of the factory and outside loading bays, where the arrival and departure of trucks can affect signal strength.
Lessons learnt
Kingsland Drinks had what looked like a straightforward solution to implement. However, deployment was not so straightforward.
Kingsland Drinks is essentially a 24/7 operation, so closing production lines at a time that best-suited IT to install new access points and technologies was just not feasible. However, the company’s year has three windows of down time: Easter, the August Bank Holiday and Christmas.
Deployment of the technology took three months, but Metcalfe emphasises that it wasn’t a straight three months – instead, it meant working around these key periods: “We broke it down. We had to work with production. If you have a line running, you can only take that line down for a period, so that’s why it took us long.
“We said we’re going to put all the access points up this week, and then we come back and do cables the week after. But we did it in sections – so, we did a warehouse section at a time and then built from it.”
Like with any deployment of any technology, there were teething problems. For example, the length of cable runs to Wi-Fi cabinets located on the factory floors which, in some cases, extended to well over 100m and so involved installing more cabinets. And cliché as it may be for Manchester, the weather was among the issues faced during the varying technology implementation windows.
“[The temperature] ranged from -10 to 40+,” Metcalfe adds. “We had to do a lot of network reconfiguration. When we started delving into the actual configurations and switches, the infrastructure was different to what we were told – we were finding VLANs for this, VLANs for that, etc.”
Metcalfe says his team learnt a lot from the installation and subsequent operation. The company had to change some of its original specs while in operation, such as cabinets not in positions as per original plans and objects that were not wired to where they were expected to have been. But the biggest lessons were not directly related to technology.
“It’s a big job. It’s not just a piece of Cat 5 cable. It’s fibre, it’s switches, it’s small form-factor pluggable modules. We learnt a lot. From a business point of view, we learnt to work with the production managers, which was key because an IT department’s job is the tech, but for a production manager, their job is the job. And when we realised we were better engaging with the production managers to get stuff done and worked with them to understand our complications, we sped up progress.
“The first [time] we met the production managers, we didn’t talk about wireless, we asked them what their problems were. They said, ‘Well, I can’t scan it. The gun doesn’t go off.’ So, we said, ‘We can fix that’. We worked with the production managers to resolve their issues rather than talk about technologies.”
Holker’s work is very much ongoing, and the next phases of engagement will involve expanding the core infrastructure such as expanded fibre runs, edge switching, and whether the core switches may need to be upgraded. Core switching and fibre runs are planned for the August shutdown period, with the main switchover for the core network likely taking place over the Christmas shutdown.
Has Polkinghorne succeeded in his mission to end complaints? He believes that, in operation, the Channel Blanket concept is running how it was explained and demonstrated before the company installed it.
“You can fly between all these [access points] and it doesn’t drop the signal,” he says. “And that’s perfect. With the Channel Blanket solution out there, you lose a bit of bandwidth, but you gain the connectivity. That’s exactly what we wanted.”
Crucially, the firm’s productivity gains have been significant. Polkinghorne calculates that they’ve gained a day a month for every single forklift truck driver who now does not have to leave the production lines and manually input information, and that given the Allied Telesis technology has been in place for 18 months, the gains so far have probably paid for the entire system.
Going forward, Kingsland Drinks will stick with Allied Telesis for the core wireless technology including switching and access points, as well as with management solutions for procedures such as migrations and diagnostics. It is also looking at new wireless devices.
Fundamentally though, Polkinghorne says that the company is not looking at changing its SAP business system as it – like the new wireless infrastructure – is doing what it is needed to do.
“At the moment, we have hand scanners and we’re looking at pushing people out there with tablets so they can load, and they couldn’t do that before,” says Polkinghorne. “We’re looking at truck-mounted devices, but we’re not looking at the Amazon driverless truck thing – I don’t think our site would be suitable for that.
“But it’s all within the bounds of what it should have been in the first place. And we can only do it now because the WLAN is working properly. What [senior management] is happy about is that we’re not losing all that time anymore. And that’s put a big smile on all everyone’s face.”
