Incorporating Greener Network Designs Into Our Wine & Spirits Business

The global pandemic changed us in ways we did not expect. Those who could work from home might wake up with a coffee or tea and start their workday in the kitchen with their laptop on Wi-Fi and, later, move to a couch in the living room or outside and all of this without the constraints of cables.

When people came back to the office, there were grumblings about having to 'plugin,’ especially in places where wireless was less evolved. We liked to move around the office and sit with our colleagues or have a quick ad-hoc meeting with teams. This is part of our culture of conviviality at Pernod Ricard. This experience of connectivity extends to teams in our vineyards or distilleries that want to have a video call active while checking on their fermentation process, and that means solid Wi-Fi. And unlike fine wine, Wi-Fi does not improve with age.

The quality of our time together is just as important as how we interact with our environment and planet. It was clear that our Wi-Fi needed to adapt, but could we evolve our wireless network to enhance our conviviality? Could we transform how we implement this technology while having a positive impact on our planet? The answer was, why not?

The Wi-Fi Only Office – Our Wi-Fi thinking needed to evolve from the legacy strategy of covering a space to how much bandwidth we could give to users over our wireless networks. Then we looked at how that bandwidth could be available everywhere in our offices without needing cables. Cisco was one vendor that had the features we needed and the back-end system to help us unlock the ‘hidden data’ of Wi-Fi for our teams to properly design and troubleshoot.

Enterprise Design – While Wi-Fi design itself was critical to good performance, enterprise architecture requires more scalability across all of our offices, distilleries and vineyards. This presented challenges, especially when deploying geographically in EMEA, APAC and AME. Deployments needed as much standardization and flexibility as our design itself. Our mantra soon became the design of the deployment is just as important as the design itself, and this led to our global playbook for implementations.

We also engaged with our global partner, Orange Business, to help us redesign our quoting, ordering and shipment processes. Orange can source 99 percent of our technology components across all of the countries where we operate and then automate our ordering with an e-commerce-style interface.

Green IT – Network architecture may have a long lifecycle of 5 to 10 years, depending on the type of technology, so it was important that we incorporate Green strategies as soon as we can to lower our footprint, use lower power devices and reduce the amount of cabling we need. Wi-Fi enables us to become ‘greener’ by reducing our need for switches in favor of Wi-Fi Access Points, and this reduces the overall wattage, cooling and cabling of our solutions.

Not a Perfect World – whenever you revolutionize how you operate, it requires a lot of change on your team to support the challenges that arise. For example, older Wi-Fi devices may not always support the latest standards or security. This is where a great team can make a difference with innovative and creative ideas, and I am grateful and proud of what our team has achieved. It is our people that make great things happen.