Fast growing coffee chain require a scalable and fully managed wireless solution.

Black Sheep Coffee are one of London’s fastest growing coffee chains with new stores popping up every couple of weeks. With customer numbers increasing and IT requirements becoming more complex, Black Sheep needed a partner who could provide this.

The Challenge

Existing stores had a mix-mash of IT infrastructure consisting off different routers, multiple access points for staff wireless, EPOS and guest wireless. Routers were installed in customer facing areas or hidden away inaccessible under counters.

There was no public facing WiFi and with regular IT drop outs, the ability to take card payments was being hugely impacted.

Alongside this, there was a desire to increase the onsite IT with managers now requiring laptops and ongoing support for these.

Black Sheep required a fully managed wireless and IT offering.

The Solution

Focus designed a bespoke package for Black Sheep. This offered a scalable solution suited to the increasing number of stores but with a consistent and predictable price which included the broadband, IT support and all the equipment required to run the wireless. There were no upfront costs.

The solution was designed to be simple. Every site had the same configuration of managed router, managed switch and one or two access points.

Each site had a new central comms cabinet installed and all existing broadband lines were relocated to this cabinet. An additional failover broadband line was also installed.

Focus then attended the sites outside of trading hours and transferred everything over to the new solution. All old kit was replaced with standardised equipment which was installed and labelled for easy access. One new access point was installed in each store which would provide secure access to the till system, credit card terminals, staff wireless and guest wireless.

The sites were tested ready for the next days trade and then an engineer revisited the following morning to walk the store manager through basic troubleshooting and all the new equipment.

The Result

The solution provided a huge reduction in IT issues and provided a far simpler solution for onsite staff to self-manage and self-diagnose with the assistance of Focus’s 24x7 helpdesk for incidents that a reboot wouldn’t sort.

Focus had a back-end management portal which provided a real-time view of every site so we could be alerted to problems before the store found htem.

The introduction of guest wireless provided the ability for true data capture for the Black Sheep marketing team. Within the first month of the wireless being live there were over 5000 individual connections and user records created on the system that the team could use to market customers back to the stores.