04 April 2024
Riverford Organic Farmers Ltd has expanded from a one-man team of founder Guy Singh-Watson delivering homegrown organic vegetables to friends, to a national vegetable box scheme delivering to around 50,000 customers each week. Today, the company employs 1,000 people and has three regional sister farms and a farm in France.
With multiple sites and IT real estate to manage, there are a vast array of devices that are integral to keeping the business functioning at peak performance. It’s important for the IT team to have visibility of these devices from both an IT infrastructure and environmental monitoring perspective to ensure that food is kept fresh and at the right temperature and humidity 24/7.
Monitoring the network
To address this challenge, Ollie Kerslake, infrastructure lead at Riverford Organic Farmers, opted for Paessler’s PRTG network monitoring solution to get more visibility over the storage of farm produce and meat as well as their whole IT estate.
“There are refrigerators and freezers at various sites that are monitored using PRTG. The warehouse team and the butchery team have screens in key locations so that they can review the dashboard at all times and check everything is operating correctly,” said Kerslake.
The potential impact on the business if the fridges or freezers shut down would be £500,000 in terms of the volume of stock that needs to be kept fresh on any given day, so it is essential that they are monitored 24/7. Apart from the warehouse and butchery teams needing to check the PRTG dashboard, it constantly operates in the background.
“There are around 20 people within the business across various departments using PRTG who look at the dashboard, but the beauty of it is that we don’t really have to look at it,” said Kerslake. “In terms of its day-to-day use, we just let it do its thing, and we just act on alerts when necessary. Occasionally we’ll check it if we’re doing any kind of road mapping or scoping out of projects, when we will look at trend data to use it for forecasting. But unless we’re adding new devices to it, we just leave it to run in the background and alert us when action is required.”
Riverford Organic Farmers uses 1,500 sensors across its whole business. The IT team monitors the key components, such as CPU usage, RAM disk space, Windows services, and network connectivity of the server. Switches, firewalls and access points, and WiFi usage are also monitored, so the team can see if it’s having any internet spikes or if the access points are being over-utilised.
Around the clock monitoring of the various sites and IT infrastructure is a key priority for the IT team, which is now often alerted to issues and can resolve them before they have impact on the business or customers.
“Two weeks ago, our ISP, who provides our MPLS which connects all our remote sites to our headquarters experienced an issue late in the evening. It was only due to PRTG picking up packet loss from our firewall at our headquarters that we knew that there was an issue. We failed to receive anything from our ISP and we didn’t get anything from our users because they’d all gone home for the day,” said Kerslake. “So, without the alert from PRTG we would have potentially come in the following day to a complete disaster, and all our remote sites would have been disconnected. So, it was thanks to PRTG alerting us to the fact that there was potentially an issue that we managed to resolve it that same evening and carry out the necessary actions before any of our external suppliers or customers noticed that there was a problem. It also helped us avoid around £10,000 of missed deliveries. Not only does it make our day easier, but it also gives us an element of security, so it helps us to sleep a little bit easier too.”
Going green
The possibilities that PRTG offers Riverford Organic Farmers are exciting when it comes to making the company more innovative and sustainable in the future, too.
“My vision for the future in terms of using PRTG in new ways is to measure our environmental impact from an IT perspective, as we’re already futuristic and agile, we can be even more efficient. When it comes to developing the IoT side of the business we have started looking at monitoring some of our current infrastructure,” said Kerslake. “For example, when we pick and pack products for our boxes, we’re running an initial trial with our facilities and maintenance team to spot potential problems with hardware if the boxes are packed by machines rather than humans. We’re going through a first trial of what that looks like, the software required and how we could monitor equipment.”
PRTG can also help the IT team measure the potential environmental impact of the use of AI and automation. Every AI request generates power, so Riverford Organic Farmers is cautious on its use. The organisation has hybrid environments at its HQ - half of its IT is on site and half is in a cloud – which draws a lot of power. With careful monitoring and mindful use, Riverford Organic Farmers continues to consider future energy efficiency.
“We are a farming and food and beverage business, and we pride ourselves on being pretty high-tech in that space,” said Kerslake. “Our five-year vision is to leverage more AI and automation. We’re heavily investing in AI just to help us forecast how some day-to-day tasks can be better performed by using robotics. A lot of Riverford is still very manual even though we have put some automation in our warehouses in place. When it comes to AI and the way that the company will evolve in the next few years, we see Paessler PRTG as a partner on our journey to become smarter and better optimised. PRTG will always have a place at Riverford and my team will fight very hard on that point.”
