Digitalization is giving a new face to the world of transport and logistics, offering concrete opportunities to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs and enhance the customer experience. This is what Arco Spedizioni has been pursuing for several years, which, thanks to the introduction of enabling technologies, positions itself as a cutting-edge company capable of meeting the growing needs of customers in a more efficient and effective way. Active since 1970, with headquarters in Monza, Arco Spedizioni is one of the main Italian companies in the freight transport sector with a turnover of over 350 million and more than 6 million shipments carried out last year. In the last decade it has combined its experience as a national courier with the specialization of international transport.

Investments in enabling technologies

“Digitalization is a continuous process of transformation of processes and procedures” – explains Francesco Cantoni, IT Manager Arco Spedizioni. For Arco Spedizioni, customers are active and participating subjects in every phase of the process: thanks to shipment tracking, they can monitor the journey of the goods step by step directly from the company portal. To create a valuable customer experience, however, it is essential to set up an adequate work environment through structured cabling, wireless coverage, integration with existing systems.

From these needs for technological improvement, the Monza 2.0 project was born in 2022, which Arco Spedizioni entrusted to the expert hands of the professionals of WeAreProject and Cisco Meraki solutions that allowed the Monza-based company to quickly move to an innovative and efficient model for managing networks and other IT resources.

The Monza 2.0 project

In the past, Arco Spedizioni had a single server room on which almost all of the services were distributed. With Monza 2.0, this logic has been completely overturned. The need was to create a second server room, to balance the workloads, but also to have centralized management, a possibility that Cisco Meraki allowed. To ensure that the aggregation of the two CED rooms could exist, devices capable of supporting a flexible stacking protocol were chosen, we are talking about the Cisco Meraki MS425 Series which, despite being arranged in two delocalized rooms, are seen as a single aggregation.

“This technology has allowed us – continues Cantoni – to connect not only the servers, but also each individual device and peripheral cabinet, simultaneously to the two CED rooms. Raising the level of business continuity, internal security and exposed services were our objectives, made possible by an enabling technology such as that of Cisco Meraki”. In the current infrastructure scenario, the temporary loss of a data center room does not compromise the provision of services to the entire national network or even at a peripheral level, thanks to the type of network built that connects each cabinet to both rooms. From the servers located in Monza today Arco Spedizioni provides core services (for example the management of warehouse guns), provides services for the management of operations that constitute the company’s passive cycle and services to make information such as weight, volumes, photographs of their shipment available to the customer. The Monza 2.0 project ended at the end of 2023.

“All the best projects, once implemented, can be reviewed and improved” – Cantoni is keen to point out – and, thanks to the skills of WeAreProject (Cisco Premium Partner with various specializations including that relating to managed services), we were able to make several design changes along the way, which were decidedly improvements. In addition to the switch part, the wireless part was also unified with the adoption of WiFi 6 technology thanks to Cisco Meraki MR36 devices for the warehouse operations part and Cisco Meraki MR46 for the office part where there is a high density of clients. Greater application visibility and optimized infrastructure management “Cisco Meraki is a complete solution, a cloud-oriented technology that, thanks to a single dashboard with an intuitive interface, allows us to standardize configurations across the entire national territory, provides us with greater application visibility of traffic within the network and constant monitoring of alarms,” – Cantoni points out. “We are evaluating an expansion of the service for the branches in the near future and we are currently testing the sensor part” – concludes Cantoni.