GoBolt is one of the fastest-growing third-party logistics (3PL) providers offering “pick and pack” and last-mile delivery services for millions of orders per year out of their 13 locations across North America, totaling more than 1.2 million square feet of warehouse space.
Reliability and uptime are critical for GoBolt's business, and they were looking for a solution that offered top-tier networking, internet, and Wi-Fi.
GoBolt takes network infrastructure extremely seriously
Co-founder and CTO Heindrik Bernabe explains how GoBolt fits into today’s e-commerce landscape: " When you place an order with one of our Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) clients, the order comes to our warehouse. We then pick the order from inventory, pack it, label it, and either ship it to you or load it onto one of our trucks for last-mile delivery to your door.”
For GoBolt, handling that volume of goods for its merchants requires a robust network that can handle both its Internet of Things (IoT) devices—such as robotic pickers and scanners—and its cloud-based software stack.
For an operation this dependent on communication, it’s no wonder Heindrik takes network infrastructure extremely seriously.
“In this process of pick packing, everything runs through the network. Our software stack must work in real-time, so the infrastructure must be reliable and available 100% of the time.” Heindrik Bernabe Co-founder and CTO, GoBolt
Reliability and uptime are cusiness critical
Since switching to Meter, Heindrik says they’ve had, “zero unscheduled downtime. Working with our previous IT company, we had regular outages. Every hour we’re down costs us and our merchants in lost sales, upset customers, and brand reputation.” Meter always alerts him to planned software or hardware updates that require downtime so he can plan around them to minimize impact.
“Whenever there’s an update that will require being offline, Meter proactively reaches out to let me know what’s going on and to schedule it for a time that’s minimally invasive to our operations.” Heindrik adds this anecdote about Meter’s penchant for proactivity, “the team notified us that a Wi-Fi access point (AP) was down. This is obviously cause for concern due to the potential impact on operations at that site. Their investigation concluded that a forklift driver had hit the device, knocking it offline. I was able to have someone onsite reconnect the AP before anyone else had noticed a lag in service.”
Vertical integration: stacking wins on top of wins
One of the biggest draws for Heindrik, when it came to replacing GoBolt’s previous IT provider was that Meter is vertically integrated. From hardware to software, Meter’s systems are all developed and supported in-house by a team of dedicated experts. “It was super important for us to have a networking solution that’s super easy to onboard and maintain,” he remembers.
“Meter has shown us all the data that they capture, all the metrics they use to troubleshoot and create solutions for their customers. That level of data and analytics gave me a lot of confidence when we selected Meter.”
Another draw for Heindrik is the lack of middle people. Their previous IT contractor would intake the ticket, then contact the hardware or software manufacturer for support—doubling the number of steps involved to get an answer. With Meter, all it takes is one touchpoint to sort out any issue, no matter the complexity.
“Although they did the installation, our former IT company only had portal access to the software provider, so they couldn’t do any actual troubleshooting. They had to call the incumbent support team for help, then wait for a callback, and so on. The time-to-fix was multiplied by how many people had to have their hands in the pie,” Heindrik shares.
Compared to that experience, working with Meter was simply a matter of reporting their total square footage and location addresses and Meter took it from there. Vendor management was consolidated, ISP selection was simplified, and every service came down to one monthly invoice.
To top it all off, installation across all 13 locations, covering all 1.2 million square feet, took all of three months. Heindrik says, “That’s incredible! For any other IT company I’ve worked with, that timeframe is unheard of.”
Got IoT? not a problem for Meter
The 3PL industry is quickly adopting an assortment of cutting-edge robotics and analytics devices that all rely on a constant connection to the network to function correctly. GoBolt is no different. In fact, they already rely heavily on such devices in all of their locations, making it imperative when finding a new network provider that they could handle the additional load these IoT devices place on infrastructure.
Heindrik tells this anecdote to explain how Meter has helped in this regard:
“We purchased a fleet of new scanning devices and were having all sorts of problems with them dropping their network connections. It was nearly constant. We kept jumping through these hoops with our former IT company where we said, ‘They’re not connecting,’ and they said, ‘Try restarting them,’ or ‘We’ll reboot the whole network,’ or ‘Try updating the firmware.’ It was a game of ‘it’s not us, it’s you,’ set on repeat.
When Meter went live, all of a sudden this entire fleet of devices was working. They just stopped dropping their connection, all at once every device was up and consistently online.”
In addition to these scanners, GoBolt uses picking robots in their warehouses alongside their human employees. These devices have complicated networking requirements that GoBolt had been unable to meet previous to working with Meter. “When we started ordering our robots, we told Meter, ‘Here are the specs, here are the requirements,’ and they had someone dispatched to ensure each location was ready for the robots when they arrived.”
Meter is stupid simple
Meter handled the entire installation process from running cables to software configuration. Heindrik adds, “Anytime there's an issue with any of our devices, Meter handles it. They’re proactively monitoring everything, 24/7. Others promise this level of off-the-shelf compatibility and support but don’t have the engineers on staff to deliver. Meter does."
In the end, for Heindrik and GoBolt, it came down to the simplicity of working with Meter. Says Heindrik, “Meter is stupid simple. They embody what you’ve always expected from the incumbents but they never quite delivered.”
For more information on how to put Meter to work for your Network as a Service needs, reach out to our team of experts today.