Rebuilding network reliability across five sites for Solent Freight Partners

The challenge

Solent Freight Partners had grown from a single depot to five sites over six years, largely through acquisition, and each site had inherited whatever network setup its previous owner had installed. There was no consistent firewall standard, no centralised monitoring, and no documented topology for any site. This became a critical risk ahead of a planned warehouse management system rollout that depended on reliable, low-latency connectivity between sites and a central server.

Our approach

We ran network health audits across all five sites, documenting real topology for the first time, and designed a unified SD-WAN architecture with consistent firewall standards and centralised monitoring. Rollout was staged site-by-site outside of core operating hours to avoid disrupting live freight operations, with each site brought under monitoring before the next began.

The outcome

All five sites now operate on a unified, centrally monitored network. In the first year post-rollout, the business experienced a single unplanned outage, resolved within the SLA window, compared to a previous average the client estimated at several incidents per month across the group. The warehouse management system rollout proceeded with zero downtime attributable to network issues, and 94% of the year's flagged network incidents were caught and resolved proactively, before any site reported a problem.

"We'd been firefighting network issues for years without realising how much of it was preventable. Meridian Grove found and fixed three security gaps in the first audit that our old provider had never even flagged." - Operations Director, Solent Freight Partners