ic case study | RETAIL & WHOLESALE

NWF Fuels & Agriculture

Turnover: £350m

Employees: 250+

Solutions provided:

NWF Fuels is the UK’s 3rd largest distributor of fuel oil and fuel cards, delivering over 665 million litres across the UK per year.

With 116,000 customers being supplied from many fuel depots across the country, NWF Fuels operate in markets that are large and robust.

SITUATION
NWF Fuels were struggling with slow internet connectivity and phone systems that were antiquated, and no longer supported. Due to the nature of the business, depot locations are rural, which meant that dedicated internet connectivity was expensive.

NWF’s phone system was also unreliable, it meant sales calls were being missed or dropped, resulting in the loss of thousands of pounds every week in order revenue. Due to the transactional nature of their business, if a customer couldn’t get through to purchase their oil, they would simply go elsewhere.

TASK
Spanning across 15 sites, NWF required internet connectivity, telephony and network security to ensure all depots had the ability to connect to head office seamlessly and securely, allowing full access to email, ordering platforms and phone systems.

They also needed their phone system itself to be able to cope with the volume of incoming call traffic, so calls could always be answered by an individual, within 3 rings.

Our internet connection and phone system are crucial to the continued success of our business. Internet Central have been a key partner for us since 2011. Through their excellent support and account management, we have developed a resilient system with an effective disaster recovery solution. The solution has been tailored to keep our business running so we never miss a call.

Andy Knapper
IT MANAGER
NWF Fuels & Agriculture

ACTION
NWF implemented dedicated internet connectivity (dedicated leased lines) to the major locations and Fortigate Unified Threat Protection Firewall security across their network to keep their data secure.

They also installed broadband connections at each remote depot, connecting back to head office, allowing central access to mail servers. This enabled the adoption of cloud telephony, increasing instant failover to mobiles or other offices in the event of network failure locations (which is not uncommon in these rural areas), and no telephone systems on site to maintain.

RESULT
Since Internet Central began to work with the NWF Group in 2011, we have been integral in the set up of new NWF depots all across the country and they have grown from 15 sites to 30.

Internet Central provided a single telephony platform across all depots, with ultra reliable connectivity, meaning NWF’s communications and data network is stable, and they have full disaster recovery as a safety net.

Downtime and missed calls are a thing of the past and overall, Internet Central provided a fully scalable, secure solution that NWF have come to depend on.