Published by Patrick Gebhardt
Last updated on July 15, 2024
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7 minute read
Riverford Organic Farmers Ltd. delivers vegetables to over 50,000 customers a week. Like many major companies with an IT estate and multiple sites to manage, there is a vast array of devices that are integral to keeping the business functioning at peak performance. It’s important for the IT team at Riverford Organic Farmers to have visibility of these devices from both an IT infrastructure and environmental monitoring perspective. This is even more integral to a food and beverage business because the food needs to be kept fresh and at the right temperature and humidity 24/7.
iAbout Riverford Organic Farmers Ltd
Riverford Organic Farmers Ltd was founded by Guy Singh-Watson, who has grown the business over the last 30 years from delivering homegrown organic vegetables to friends, to a national vegetable box scheme delivering to around 50,000 customers each week. The company employs 1000 people and is based in Devon, England with three regional sister farms and a farm in France.
Enter Paessler PRTG
Ollie Kerslake, Infrastructure lead at Riverford Organic Farmers, and his team have been using Paessler’s PRTG network monitoring solution for five years to get more visibility over the storage of their farm produce and meat as well as their whole IT estate.
Kerslake explained: “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.” 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. Kerslake adds: “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. 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.”
Sustainability and measuring the energy efficiency of AI
The possibilities that PRTG offers Riverford Organic Farmers are exciting when it comes to making the company more innovative and sustainable in the future. Kerslake explains: “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. 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 we have to be cautious of that. On site in our HQ we’ve got hybrid environments, half of our IT is on site and half of it is in a cloud. And that does draw a lot of power, so we have to be mindful of how we monitor that going forwards to make our company even more energy efficient.’
“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. In terms of its day-to-day use, we just let it do its thing, and we just act on alerts when necessary.”
Five-year vision to more AI and automation
Kerslake concludes: “We are a farming and food and beverage business, and we pride ourselves on being pretty high-tech in that space. 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.”
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