Since the first McBride company was set up in North Manchester in 1927 to supply chemical processing products to Lancashire’s cotton industry, the organisation has grown into a multinational business that operates from sixteen factories in seven countries. The company’s existing networks at each of its six UK sites had reached capacity and could no longer cope with the increasing volumes of voice and data traffic. Being prone to failure when under the pressure, the networks had started to severely impact McBride’s service delivery to its customers. McBride was also running a number of separate archaic telephony systems on old telephone exchanges, which offered little resilience and affected business continuity across individual sites and the company as a whole.
In addition, the existing analogue CCTV cameras at each of McBride’s large manufacturing sites in Burnley, Bradford and Middleton had restricted views of their perimeter zones, offering limited security and health and safety capabilities.
Recognising the need for a full upgrade of its Local Area Network (LAN), VoIP and surveillance system, McBride put the replacement project out to tender and chose Telindus over three competitors to design and manage the implementation.
Working with Cisco and DVTel, Telindus designed and deployed a centralised system that enabled the LAN, VoIP and CCTV to be controlled and managed from its site in Middleton. As a result, each sites’ systems can now be managed locally and remotely, giving the IT and management teams increased mobility as they can log in at any location and work efficiently and effectively.
The analogue security cameras were replaced with 27 IP CCTV cameras, spread across the 5-acre site at Burnley, the 13-acre site at Bradford and the 11-acre site at Middleton. The new digital surveillance system enables recording for up to 30 days at a time and facilitates 360° monitoring at each site’s perimeter, acting as a security deterrent as well as supporting McBride’s fire detection and safety procedures. The IP CCTV deployment also facilitates access to a large storage bank of high quality images and footage can also be exported onto DVD if extra storage is required.
Gary Wilson, Factory Systems Controller at McBride, said: “McBride had an existing relationship with Telindus and we knew we could trust the team’s technical expertise and knowledge. We also had complete confidence in the team’s project management skills and ability to meet our extremely tight and aggressive deadline of just nine months.
“Telindus’ team engaged with us from the start and fully understood the business implications of upgrading our systems. The team managed to implement our centralised ICT system with minimal impact on the 1,000 or so members of staff involved in the project. Furthermore, the LAN is now infinitely faster and more resilient than our original network and we are no longer experiencing single points of failure, thus enabling each site to improve service delivery to our customers. Our jobs have also been made infinitely easier as technical issues can be diagnosed and fixed efficiently and quickly, and our single service level agreement and point of contact at Telindus has saved us vast amounts of time when we have any queries.”
Mark Hutchinson, Managing Director of Telindus, said: “The new IP system at McBride is a great example of how a next-generation network can revolutionise business practices and provide the flexibility and scalability that may be required for future applications and upgrades. There would have been a significant risk to the business if McBride had stayed with its existing LAN and telephony infrastructure, and there was pressure to implement the new centralised system quickly and efficiently. We are proud that the team has been able to meet McBride’s tight timeframe.”