The contract depended on a network that didn't exist yet

Client and context

Alan runs Creative Freight, a storage, logistics and events business working from two UK sites with around 10,000 pallet spaces and more than forty years of trading behind it.

Like most companies of that size, it has no IT department, no IT supplier, and until this job no particular reason to have needed either.

The problem

A German manufacturer wanted to open a European distribution operation and run it out of Alan’s warehouse in Coventry.

They would ship their own equipment: desktops, laptops, and handheld pick scanners for stock control. Five packing stations would go into the warehouse. All of it had to reach their SAP system, hosted in their own data centre in Germany, over both wired and wireless connections, from a warehouse floor that had no usable network at all.

Their IT department set out what they needed, and set it out properly: five packing stations at three network ports each, thirty power sockets plus five more for the scanners, spares on top, the Wi-Fi carried inside the same network segment, and three specific firewall rules governing what could reach the internet and what could reach Germany.

It was a good specification. It was also written by an IT department, for an IT department, and sent to a logistics operator who does not have one. Alan could not read it, could not price it, and could not tell anybody whether it was reasonable.

That was the actual problem. The contract was real, the deadline was real, and there was nobody on the receiving end able to turn a requirements list into a building with cables in it.

What we did

1NM became the technical counterpart Alan did not have.

That meant translating a specification into a design for one specific warehouse: what hardware, where the cable runs, how it coexists with a working logistics operation, and what it should cost. Then building it.

A site-to-site VPN from the warehouse to the manufacturer’s data centre, so their equipment in Coventry behaved as though it sat on their own network in Germany, with the SAP system reachable across it.

A new wired and wireless network through the warehouse, reaching the packing stations and the racking, because nothing usable existed.

Segmentation, which is the part that matters. The manufacturer’s devices sit on their own network segment with their own Wi-Fi, and that segment alone carries the route back to Germany, governed by the firewall rules they specified: out to the internet, out through the tunnel, and inbound from the tunnel so their own people could reach the equipment. Nothing else. Alan’s own business traffic runs on a separate segment with its own Wi-Fi, and visitors get a guest network that reaches the internet and nothing else. Three groups, one set of hardware, default deny between them: the only paths that exist are the ones that were asked for.

A gateway and a managed switch. The switch carries the segments and powers four ceiling-mounted Wi-Fi 6 access points over the same cabling. The gateway terminates the tunnel, routes between segments and enforces the policy, so inter-segment traffic cannot take a shortcut around the rules that govern it. All of it is managed from one controller.

Specified against a budget. Alan’s brief was to do this economically, and the equipment reflects that: business-grade kit doing proper VLAN segmentation, power over Ethernet, central management and roaming across the warehouse floor. It is not the tier we would specify for a large estate, and it did not need to be.

What decides whether a network like this holds is the design, not the badge on the box: whether the segmentation is right, whether the routing is right, whether the firewall policy does exactly what was asked and nothing more. Those are the same at any budget, and they are what the tunnel at the far end is relying on. Spending three times as much on hardware would have bought Alan very little he could point at.

Physical cabling is delivered by the electricians we work with. They ran the runs into the warehouse and out to the access points; we designed and specified the network and configured everything above the cable.

Handover documentation and change control. Alan has nobody to inherit this, which is precisely why it is written down: what was built, how it is configured, and what has changed since. If 1NM vanished tomorrow, the next supplier picks it up from the documentation rather than from scratch.

None of this is exotic. Segmented networks and a site-to-site tunnel are ordinary work at enterprise scale, and that is the whole point: ordinary at that scale, and entirely out of reach for a logistics firm with no IT function and no idea where to begin.

Outcome

Delivered in February 2026.

The manufacturer got its European distribution base, running out of Coventry and connected to its own systems as though it were down the corridor rather than across the North Sea.

Alan kept the contract, and the warehouse space it fills, on the strength of infrastructure he could not have specified, bought or built himself.

There is no dashboard for this one, and no metric worth inventing. A network either carries what it is meant to carry, to the places it is meant to reach, and nowhere else, or it does not. This one does.

Stack used

A gateway terminating the site-to-site VPN and enforcing policy between segments, managed switching with segmented VLANs, power over Ethernet, wired and wireless networking with a separate SSID per segment. Structured cabling by a contracted electrician. Handover documentation and a change log.