Lupa Foods reduces business risk by becoming a partner with CPiO Cloud
Hertfordshire based Lupa Foods is a UK based full-service B2B partner to the food industry, importing and distributing Mediterranean food ingredients to some of the largest food manufacturers, recipe box companies and retailers in the UK.
With a legacy spanning 120 years, and as one of the UKs longest established food importers, innovation and a customer-centric approach are at the forefront of everything the company does.
Aging infrastructure and the accompanying risk of server downtime impacting business continuity became a priority for Lupa Foods.
Manish Mandavia, chief operating officer at Lupa Foods explained, “It was becoming a huge business risk to have old servers in the backroom. If the server went down, it would be a challenge to continue to provide a service to our customers. Our options were to either replace the servers or take the next step and just go cloud based.”
It is this drive to improve and deliver even greater customer success that sparked the need to look into implementing a robust full-service Cloud solution into the business.
Lupa Foods relationship with CPiO
When Lupa Foods looked to refresh its core business system it turned to its long-term partner, CPiO. Manish explains, “We had been using Sage Line 500, which is quite an old system. When we looked to modernise we were keen to find a solution that could be fully hosted. Happy to remain with a Sage family product, we decided upon Sage 200 in the cloud.”
When it came to exploring partners for a full cloud solution, we turned to a partner familiar with hosting Sage. It just felt right and made sense to stick with CPiO because we've been working with them for a while. They already understood our business, so we were confident in what could be delivered in the CPiO Cloud.”
Exploring a fully hosted cloud solution
With the need to bolster business continuity and reduce operational disruption, the move away from physical servers was critical. Eliminating the associated cost of powering and cooling servers, along with the ongoing upgrade investment cycle was very attractive to the company.
Hosting also offered a number of additional benefits, including access to other technologies in the cloud. Lupa Foods asked CPiO to develop a proposal to optimise the power of the cloud.
Joel Campbell, CPiO cloud system manager said: “Having worked with Lupa Foods for many years we really understand their vision. Even though we had never delivered an infrastructure service to them we were all confident that becoming the delivery partner for their cloud solution would be a good fit. The CPiO fully hosted managed service solution made sense for the company’s next step.
As a fully hosted cloud customer all server infrastructure to run Lupa Foods is provided for and managed by us for a single monthly fee, based on the business's monthly users. As part of the service, we manage all data backups, security, patching and proactively monitor the maintenance of their systems. In addition, the team has access to all of our CPiO cloud experts.”
Manish says, “We thought the CPiO Cloud team would be a great fit for helping us to take our next step implementing a fully hosted cloud solution. The role of the technical team was invaluable, they really guided us all the way, we were led by their advice and expertise.”
The team at CPiO prides itself on transparency, giving new customers access to current cloud customers to ask them about their experiences, connecting organisations to improve the service and adoption of CPiO Cloud.
“The transition to a cloud solution was very smooth with minimal disruption and high adoption, six years on from implementation Lupa Foods is 100% Cloud based – everything we run is through the cloud now.”
Manish shared that the planning process helped the smooth transition to a full cloud solution, noting that CPiO helped them plan for every eventuality.
“As a result, we now experience less downtime, fewer service issues and upgrades to the system, or application install, are smoother because it's all done remotely. The benefits were apparent straight away, committed downtime was gone.”
CPiO Cloud’s Fully Hosted Managed Service has given Lupa Foods more time, improved operational efficiency and has increased productivity.
The move to a cloud solution has also given the team at Lupa Foods an open mind and confidence when relocating its offices.
“We've had to move offices a couple of times within the first five years, and it's made that process a lot easier. Because all you need is an Internet connection. The CPiO team has handled everything for us.”
Incidentally, the implementation of a full cloud infrastructure in the business before the Covid-19 pandemic period was instrumental to the company’s ability to pivot to homeworking with ease. “If we hadn't gone to cloud the whole Covid period would have been a nightmare. The fact that we were able to work remotely quickly was one of the most impactful elements.”
So, what’s next for Lupa Foods?
There is no doubt that Lupa Foods is on a digital journey that Sage and CPiO are sure to be part of for the foreseeable future.
Manish said: “We are keen to work with CPiO on an advisory capacity in what we can do in the cloud, with regards to applications or modules that we might need to improve functionality.
At the moment we're deciding on whether an upgrade to Sage is needed or not.
Joel said: “We are pleased that we are able to continue to support Manish and the team and encourage them to lean on our expertise when needed not only for their cloud solution but other areas of their IT”.
Moving to CPiO cloud was one of the innovations we have invested in. For anyone out their considering the move to CPiO cloud, particularly if they are on their own servers, I'd certainly tell them to move because it vastly reduces business risk.”