“Internode has a depth of expertise and a hands-on attitude. We have a long-term relationship during which Internode has built a network that has underpinned the growth of McGuigan Simeon Wines.”

McGuigan Simeon Wines Ltd CIO Ryan Klose

Internode Business Solution: McGuigan Simeon Wines Ltd

Client

McGuigan Simeon Wines Limited

Industry

Wine

The Company

McGuigan Simeon Wines is one of the largest wine companies in Australia. With well-known brands including McGuigan, Miranda, Tempus Two and Yaldara, the company also exports 70 per cent of its packaged brands to customers including the UK supermarket giant Tesco.

Business Need

Technology has become a competitive imperative for wine companies such as McGuigan Simeon Wines as they seek to meet the financial needs of Just in Time inventory and client demands of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). In a world where one missed electronic order can cost millions of dollars, McGuigan Simeon Wines recognised that a Disaster Recovery (DR) capability was vital to its corporate success.

Critical Issues

Network availability is vital for McGuigan Simeon Wines. With seven sites essential for its operational integrity, McGuigan recognised that it needed to underpin the communication network provided by its phone company with a failover network that would guarantee not one order could be lost.

Internode Solution

Internode fulfils McGuigan Simeon Wines’ Disaster Recovery (DR) requirements with broadband-based failover systems for each of the winemaker’s six primary operational sites and its head office.

Internode provides the DR network for wineries in the Barossa Valley, Loxton (both SA) and Buronga Hill, near Mildura (VIC), a major packaging plant at Merbein (VIC), the major Distribution Centre at Griffith (NSW) and the company’s national sales office at Zetland in Sydney. If any one of these locations drops off the network, it can disrupt business operations elsewhere in the McGuigan group.

The seventh site is McGuigan Simeon Wines’ corporate head office in the Adelaide suburb of Parkside, which has its core IT systems replicated in the Internode Data Centre. The two locations are connected by a 100 Mbps fibre optic link built by Internode.

Internode provides the DR network as a Managed Service, which means it both owns and maintains all the DR equipment.

McGuigan Simeon Wines Chief Information Officer Ryan Klose said the company had a layer of Internode services underpinning the Optus layer. “We have already had a couple of downtimes on Optus when the Internode DR network has automatically clicked in,” he said.

“The way we find out that the network’s running on DR is that our engineers get an SMS. Internode did a lot of work to adopt the Optus protocol and engineer it into their systems: That seamless failover is one of the results. The downtime happened on our main sales site, which has a really high volume of transactions, so we were very impressed.”

Business Benefits

McGuigan Simeon Wines implemented Internode’s Disaster Recovery system in September 2005 before it changed carriers to ensure the transition from Telstra to Optus was risk-free.

Mr. Klose said a completely reliable DR network was vital for a company servicing large global customers. “Both Coles Myer and Tesco require EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) which means we need visibility through the company down to the winery,” he said.

“If an order comes in for 1000 cases, we have to confirm within three hours whether we can supply it.

“As new technology has come in over the past 10 years, we have removed administration from wineries. If the network is disrupted, we are back to where we were 10 years ago, which is where contingency plans come into place.

“Our DR is a necessity to the business and is driven by the needs of the customer. If you lose one export order, it could have a value for $3 or $4 million.”

Mr. Klose said McGuigan had chosen Internode because of its agility, expertise and can-do attitude. “We went straight to Internode for DR,” he said.

“Above all, Internode has a depth of expertise and a hands-on attitude. We have a long-term relationship during which Internode has built a network that has underpinned the growth of McGuigan Simeon Wines.”

For more about Internode Business Solutions, visit www.internode.on.net.