IT keeps Warburtons on a roll: an interview with Martin Ogden

Martin Ogden tells Peter Gothard how IT is helping the bakery to maintain profitability in the face of rising fuel and wheat prices

“IT systems are there to make us produce and deliver bread. Anything else on top of that isn’t particularly mission critical,” explains Warburtons head of IT operations and technical architect, Martin Ogden, before adding, with a laugh, “except payroll, obviously!”

Talking to Computing after accepting a UK IT Industry Awards highly commended trophy, Ogden revealed that Warburtons’ head office IT estate includes SAP ERP, a small data centre and an area stuffed with virtual-server laden terminals that IT staff can come to in order to “try new things out”.

The family company, founded by Thomas Warburton in 1876, is justly proud of its close-knit workforce and culture where everyone mucks in, usually with a laugh and a joke.

The company’s no-nonsense northern origins are also reflected in its approach to IT.

“We work on the principal that if someone comes in and wants, say, help with PowerPoint, that comes second to producing bread,” says Ogden. “So the majority of our spend doesn’t include that. Our reporting systems won’t have the high availability that our transactional systems have. It’s just getting the right balance – we have a limited budget, so we can’t spend as much as others.”

Warburtons, according to Ogden, is the UK’s second most popular grocery brand after Coca-Cola. Ogden says it’s a testament to the company’s “canny” ability to manage its budgets that Warburtons has continued making good profits in the recession while rivals Hovis and Kingsmill have suffered “significant losses”.

And it’s IT that drives the entire process of both breadmaking and delivery, with Warburtons boasting one of the five biggest transport fleets in the country.

“We pretty much bake to demand,” says Ogden. “So, orders come in, at any time, from the big five supermarkets and our other 20,000 customers. The bread will be put into production as soon as possible, and then it’ll be put on 1,000 vehicles and distributed nationally. There are 29 sites doing this across the country.

“The demand is on us to be able to handle that traffic, and the demand is particularly on IT because we use IT to collect orders, process into production schedules and then dispatch them – what we effectively do is send signals to the dispatching areas that light up. So if a dispatcher has 10,000 toasted loaves in front of him, it’ll come up saying where it goes, and we can walk him through the dispatch of his product.”

Warburtons handles as many transactions during the night as it does in the day, in a truly 24/7 IT service.

Moving into into the cloud

“Cloud services are becoming more of a viable option for us,” says Ogden, who describes the arrival of cloud as “the biggest shift in the IT paradigm” he’s experienced in a 25-year career.

“Last June, we signed on with Microsoft 365, so we’re currently using that to deploy a new desktop environment,” says Ogden. “The initial rollout is due to complete by Easter, after which they’ll start migrating our Lotus systems into 365.”

It was mainly the need for 24/7 support that prompted the firm to abandon Lotus Notes and migrate to Microsoft. “It probably brings us a little more in line with the rest of the world,” adds Ogden.

Warburtons did look at LotusLive, too, but decided that Microsoft’s cloud service offered superior functionality.

Ogden has recently overseen a data centre migration after the company decided to close one of its two facilities and move its data to M247, a service provider based in central Manchester.

“They’re a relatively small business, but we liked how they have a similar culture to us, being a family concern,” says Ogden. “We’ve just signed a five-year contract, which we don’t usually do.

“They were selected above others – even though they failed our criteria for wanting data centres 20 miles apart and they’re only 14 – but we were very impressed with their technology and green credentials, with a very low PTE [power to equipment] – 1.2 as opposed to the usual 1.8.”

IT keeps Warburtons on a roll: an interview with Martin Ogden

Martin Ogden tells Peter Gothard how IT is helping the bakery to maintain profitability in the face of rising fuel and wheat prices

Shutting down its on-premise data centre at 6am, Warburtons had the new one at M247 up and running by 3pm the same day.

The move into cloud has allowed Warburtons to start seriously looking at virtualising its systems. Apart from the VMs in the practice room, Ogden has begun rolling out some genuinely business-critical solutions.

“We’ve just deployed Citrix XenApp 6.5, which was an update to our previous Citrix presentation server,” says Ogden. “That is all SAP, UCS and NetApp backend virtual environments, but we’re actually using the Citrix provisioning server, so we’re providing in-memory Citrix servers with fully-controlled images, so we can be consistent about what we deploy, and make them easier to reset.”

Ogden describes this deployment as the company’s “first real big step into VM”, saying that such things haven’t “really been supported by SAP” in the way Warburtons would like.

But Ogden’s cloud plans don’t end here.

“We are working on cloud-based reporting technology now, partly because it will enhance Firestone [the company’s tablet-based front line sales solution, which won the Highly Commended 2012 IT Award], but also because tracking where all the products go geographically is very useful.”

Geographical tracking in the cloud, explains Ogden, will bring “lightning-fast real time reporting” that will help Warburtons to further streamline its supply chain operation.

“The project is running behind schedule,” admits Ogden, “[but] that’s simply because the chosen vendor is running behind schedule. I can’t say who, but we’re looking to be early adopters on their new technology.”

With the price of diesel and wheat skyrocketing, the pressure on IT to deliver efficiencies and help Warburtons stay profitable has rarely been greater.

“These events would usually drive prices up, but as much as possible we’ve tried to cap those, and looked for internal efficiencies so we don’t push that on to a struggling economy,” says Ogden.

“So we can work out operational costs in IT to help that out. But of all things, we don’t compromise on quality, and that makes us think harder.”

@PeterGothard

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