The Midcounties Co-operative

Delivering a platform that gives MCC a competitive edge and also minimizes the cost of new services and customer offerings.

MCC trades in a number of business sectors including Food Retail, Travel, Energy, Funeral, Childcare, Flexible Benefits, Healthcare and Post Offices and runs its business in accordance with the values and principles that are common to Co-operative’s throughout the world.

Following a tender process Trust Systems was selected to replace a dated wireless infrastructure across the food stores.

Paul Mills, Head of Portfolio Office, MCC explains ‘This was causing a major issue for stores as any transactions held on the device at the point of failure were lost, causing duplication of effort.’

The Solution

An invitation to tender process lead to the selection of Trust Systems based on their knowledge, skills, professionalism and ROI. Trust held technical and project meetings with MCC to fully understand the issues and presented a solution that would not only eliminate the 500+ calls to the service desk a year, but also to provide a foundation and platform to host a multitude of customer and business services and offerings. Paul; continues, ‘ The selected technology would ensure the MCC staff and customers would received the world leading services from a monitored robust infrastructure.’

The Challenge

The existing wireless infrastructure in MCC Food stores was approximately 14 years old and was no longer fit for purpose considering the challenges of modern wireless devices. The environment in the stores has changed and many wireless signals from surrounding businesses and home cross over with the store wireless network causing

drop outs. Many stores using older WiFi technologies are also prone to ‘black spots’ causing wireless equipment to disconnect and lose connection and data.

The Project

The Trust Systems team produced a roadmap for delivery in conjunction with the MCC team allowing for all installs to be completed with minimal disruption to the store estate. The project team ensured that communications with stores was delivered and engineering resource allocated to ensure installs were completed on-time and within the allotted time slots.

Paul adds, ‘The Trust project management team also ensured installs were completed in the most efficient way, this reduced the overall project from 5 months to 3 months, a fantastic achievement. The project management team were also able to install new cabling into sites enabling deployment of extra hardware where required. This delivered stores an outstanding service for their new hardware.’

Benefits

‘Trust delivered to MCC a new platform that gives the business a competitive edge and also minimizes the cost of new services and customer offerings.’ Not only is the new platform delivering cost savings in terms of in life maintenance, but we are also able to save costs with future deployments. MCC have also benefited from the efficiencies that Trust found within the project delivering a state of the art platform early and to budget. This is no mean feat, Trust are now a strategic partner for MCC and will be for a long time to come.’