Transcript
with our retail partners and we feed one in three people every day on the island of Ireland. I look after the IT operations in about 850 stores, routers, switches, access points and then some of the PCs and EPOS systems from a support perspective. For our super value and central brands, we had old legacy technology. In the old world, if we were upgrading our network in a store, four teams would go in. It would be two out-of-hours visits and one, possibly two, daytime visits. You're talking about three disruptions. Service degradation is a killer in the store. If you have a service outage, that's 10 minutes a day or 20 minutes a day because my Wi-Fi doesn't work. You add that up over a year and that can become hundreds, thousands of dollars or euros. About three years ago, we went through a tender process. We piloted in 15 stores. We really were honed in on our processes and, in particular, the Zerotouch deployment process. On our cellular network, we bring up the router, deploy the switch, and then we're only switching for that 30 seconds. We're only then moving the circuit from the old to the new router. But all of the config is all in Mist. We have everything automated. The engineer, he can download the config. He can get it operational in seconds. It's one engineer, one visit, and we're done. We can replace the network in under one minute outage time in all our stores. They're not paying for people out-of-hours. They're not paying for network engineers. We've gone from a position where we didn't know whether any key was up or down in our stores. Now we know all the devices that are connected to the APs. From a deployment point of view, we've just broken through 100 stores. We'll do 300 next year, 300 the following year. That's the ROI done. And at the back end of that, we'll do another 140 stores. So we'll have our networks upgraded across the estate. We're going to upgrade our handhelds, maybe 3,000 handhelds. That's a game changer for us from a security point of view and asset management perspective. We're looking at, with our loyalty apps, deploying the AP33s at every entrance. So that's that engagement with the consumer, which is critical. We have a generational jump in our network technology. The storing of the configs, the automatic deployment, it's transformative.
