/ CASE STUDY · LOGISTICS
Northlane Group
Eleven networks, four help desks and one freight season that could not be interrupted.
Client
Northlane Group
Estate
1,400 seats · 62 sites
Duration
9 months
Services
Network, managed IT, DR
Status
Ongoing since 2023
0
Planned outages across 62 site cutovers.
-58%
Monthly incident volume, measured against the 2023 baseline.
4→1
Help desks consolidated into a single 24/7 route.
The constraint
A decade of acquisitions, none of them integrated.
The board's requirement was blunt: fix it without touching September through December, when the network moves 40% of its annual volume. That ruled out a big-bang consolidation and any approach that could not be reversed inside a shift.
What we did
01
Mapped the real estate
Six weeks of passive flow analysis at every depot. It found 29 devices with no owner, three site-to-site tunnels nobody could account for, and a warehouse management server that had not been patched since 2019.
02
Built the target in parallel
A new SD-WAN core stood up alongside the old estate, with two pilot depots running on it for a full month before anything else moved. Rollback was a routing change, tested weekly.
03
Migrated in waves of six
Six depots per fortnight, always mid-week, always with a named engineer on site and the depot manager's mobile in the runbook. Freight season was left untouched; the programme paused for fourteen weeks by design.
04
Folded four desks into one
The regional desks were retired last, once the network they supported no longer existed. Twelve of the seventeen staff moved into Northlane's new applications team; the rest transferred to our operations centre.
The thing I did not expect was how boring it became. Nine months of change and the only calls I got were the scheduled ones telling me a depot had finished early.
Marcus Feld CTO, Northlane Group
Where it stands
Three years in, still measured quarterly.
Northlane now runs on our Managed tier with a named team of five. The quarterly review is presented to their board with the same baseline we established in 2023, which is why the numbers below are comparable rather than flattering.