Northline

Northline are an experienced Australian-owned global logistics business with road and rail routes spanning Australia, and an international reach into over 100 countries. Launching with a single route in 1983 Northline have since flourished, establishing 18 depots across Australia, and servicing numerous customers in medical, mining, renewables, retail, FMCG, and pharmaceutical sectors. With Brennan’s help, a much-needed network upgrade and the migration of hosted server environments have helped Northline accelerate accuracy, productivity, and customer satisfaction.

The summary

Industry:

Transport & Logistics

Country:

Australia

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Business Challenge

With poor network performance causing recurrent outages across depots, Northline couldn’t afford to have substandard provider experiences.

Solution:

Winning at tender, Brennan worked with Northline on parallel projects: a significant network upgrade, and the migration of hosted server environments. Both had to be implemented with minimal impact to Northline’s ongoing business operations.

Results

The revitalised network and infrastructure migration have relegated outages to a thing of the past. Freight processing has accelerated, accuracy has lifted, and customer satisfaction has grown.

The Challenge

Customers depend on Northline to sort, store, pick, pack, ship, and track tonnes of freight on any given week. In turn, the Adelaide-based logistics company relies on complex IT networks and infrastructure to orchestrate operations spanning 18 strategically located depots across the country with a combined warehousing capacity of over 130,000 sqm.

Network performance and ongoing reliability issues were clogging operations. Northline’s customer service team were feeling the heat from customers chasing tickets. Provider responses and slow issue resolution compounded the issues.

It was clear a wholesale networking and infrastructure transition was needed – one that mitigated security issues, reduced downtime, and preserved business continuity.

The Solution

Working collaboratively with Northline as part of the winning RFP process, Brennan designed a fresh infrastructure and network environment, meshing their Service Center in Adelaide with their depots and ancillary sites.

Harnessing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) through a Sydney data centre, with a back-up data centre in Melbourne and auto replication in both environments, Northline embarked on a national infrastructure and network refresh.

Economic imperatives set the pace. With two active networks running simultaneously – one with the old provider, and the new one with Brennan – a speedy transition meant Northline could save time and money.

Implemented over three weekends, Northline’s infrastructure migration required Brennan to move and configure 30 servers across 18 depots – all of which incurred zero downtime, beyond the scheduled windows.

With the network installation complete, three levels of in-built redundancy – fibre, NBN and 4G network access – now offer Northline additional security, connectivity, and failover at each depot.

The infrastructure and network refresh, coupled with redundant software, also kickstarted the design, planning, and migration of Northline’s national telephony system, plus the implementation of new contact centre software for their customer service team.

Brennan run a very professional team. I like how well it’s structured, how their processes are standardised, and that measurement and task execution is easily understood. It provides confidence that everything will be addressed, and nothing will fall through the cracks.”

Phillip Short, Head of Business Systems Manager, Northline

The Result

Taken as a whole, the refreshed network and server migration has had a profound impact on Northline’s business. Thanks to an increase to the speed of access and the revitalised robustness of their refreshed network, employees are now enjoying up-to-the-second visibility.

Transactions – the majority of which are scanned and entered using handheld devices – have accelerated, with an uptick in volume processing creating fewer mistakes. Able to fulfil workloads efficiently, staff are happier and customer satisfaction has grown.

And the improved infrastructure environment has enabled Northline to embed more of the Office suite, like Teams, across the business, unlocking richer and more responsive collaboration between teams based at depots, the Service Center, or working from home.

For Phillip Short, the benefits of the transformation are obvious. “When people have the tools they need to do their job, you just get happier people. It makes their day flow, and customers get their products on time. And anything to do with customer service improvements helps the business.”

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