The client is one of the world’s largest paperboard and paper-based packaging manufacturers. Its customers include globally recognised brands of food, beverage, food service, household, personal care, and pet care products. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, it is committed to protecting the environment with a renewable, recycled, and recyclable materials portfolio.

  • 100+ year history
  • 130 facilities worldwide
  • 24,000 employees
  • Challenge
  • Solution
  • Outcome

Challenge

In 2021, the client completed the acquisition of a complementary organisation, significantly growing the business in the process, and onboarding an additional 5,000 employees and 30 factories in 13 countries.

As part of the acquisition, factories, offices and warehouses were added to the client’s estate resulting in a mismatch of networking infrastructure. Unlike the client, there had been no standardisation across the technologies used by the acquired organisation, with every site being different.

The challenge was to refresh the newly acquired sites to bring them in line with the best-in-class, uniform specifications of the existing sites. This would ensure the same level of seamless connectivity and enable the small IT team to manage them all from one central location. Bringing them onto the same Meraki platform would also provide better visibility and monitoring with the single pane of glass dashboard and the ability to add sensors and cameras to the sites.

Solution

Having previously worked together on a networking refresh across 16 of its original sites, the Natilik team knew the infrastructure and level of standardisation that the client had across its locations. From the Meraki switches and Wi-Fi 6 access points to comms cabinet cameras and sensors for heat and leak detection – the specification was set from the outset.

The client had its trusted team of Natilik experts ready to support the move to the uniform network environment, with 20 geographically dispersed sites in Germany, Poland and Sweden identified as the priority. With every site being different, each was assessed individually, Natilik worked closely alongside the client to build out each site’s requirements. Natilik used its global expertise to plan and organise the logistics of the multi-country deployment, a pivotal capability that the client had leveraged in its previous European refresh.

Outcome

The client’s IT team now has 20 additional sites up and running on its standardised Meraki environment, all easily managed from one centralised location. The team can remotely operate and analyse the sites, providing visibility they didn’t have before. These refreshes have helped make them more efficient, with plans to migrate the remaining sites over to the Meraki infrastructure to maximise these benefits.

 

  • Standardised environment

    A fully integrated, standardised Meraki environment, all managed from a central location.

  • Improved visibility

    The ability to remotely operate and analyse sites, significantly improved visibility across the infrastructure.

  • Future efficiencies

    The success has provided the IT team with a business case to roll this uniform infrastructure across the entire business.