Case Study

Horizon International Cargo

Horizon have gone from being a small freight forwarder with a single London office to an award-winning global business with offices in 9 countries across the globe. We are proud to have helped lay the IT foundations for their success.

 

Their IT Challenges

As a global freight forwarder, Horizon has a number of unique challenges.

Firstly, they are a true 24/7 business as they have offices spread across different time zones. This means that any downtime has to be kept to a strict minimum, regardless of the time of day. The result of this being that any disruptive work such as hardware replacement has to be carefully planned and executed in a timely manner.

Horizon’s continued growth calls for systems that can effectively cope with the increasing demands from their clients, now and into the future.

Due to the heavy reliance on their IT systems to arrange and track orders, it is imperative that these are as robust as possible. Any period of these systems being offline would result in an immediate impact on the company’s bottom line.

There is also the challenge of their staff communicating and working together across 22 different offices, in several different countries and in different languages!

About Horizon International Cargo

Horizon International Cargo is one of the fastest-growing freight forwarders in the UK. They have over 20 years of experience in the industry and a worldwide presence with offices in London, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Miami, New York and Tokyo.

Their continued achievements have led to a number of accolades, such as their recent inclusion in London Stock Exchange’s “Top 1000 Companies to Inspire Britain”, “Top 1000 Companies to Inspire Europe” and The Sunday Times’ “International Track 200.”

An innovative approach to IT has helped assist this growth, including seamlessly connecting all global offices and their unique hiCloud ordering and tracking system.

 

Our Solution

Coretek are privileged to have been Horizon’s technology partner for almost two decades. In this time, we have worked together to produce a reliable, scalable IT infrastructure that can service Horizon’s client base.

It was established early on in Horizon’s growth that they would require a solution to be able to share files across their different offices. Microsoft’s DFS technology was used, which allows for each site to keep a local copy of data, with any changes automatically synced to the other sites in real time. Such an approach negates the performance issues that would come with having to access data in another location across a VPN but keeps the benefits of all sites looking at a consistent set of data.

This foundation would be complemented by the emergence of cloud technology as Horizon moved to a hybrid cloud approach.

In addition to the existing infrastructure, Coretek designed and implemented a private cloud platform for Horizon, hosted in our own CoretekCloud. One key part of this platform is its scalability. Horizon can bring additional servers online or allocate additional resources at the touch of a button – making them able to adapt quickly to additional demands. The system has been designed from the start to be highly reliable, with redundancy throughout to ensure there are no single points of failure in the system. This is vital in an industry where even minutes of downtime could cost the company thousands of pounds.

They have also layered public cloud services like Office 365 on top of this so they can take advantage of the cloud-based apps and collaboration tools that this suite provides such as SharePoint and Teams.

Horizon themselves have carried out considerable development work in-house, led by CTO David Mapes. Most notably, the inception of their revolutionary hiCloud platform, which allows clients to be able to track their orders directly from the Horizon website.

Don't just take our word for it

 

 

“We consider them to be exceptional!”

 

 

David Wright
Finance Director at Horizon International Cargo

Top 5 Benefits

Here are the top benefits Horizon International Cargo gained over the period we have worked with them:

 

NStaff can collaborate and work seamlessly from all across the globe

NSystems designed to be highly reliable to prevent costly downtime and stay online 24/7

N Scalable systems have helped assist massive growth – from a single office to 22

N They have won numerous awards and accolades

N This has resulted in a merger with world-leading logistics firm, Scan Global Logistics

Return on investment

The right IT foundations have allowed Horizon to achieve exponential growth, from a single London office to 22 offices across 9 countries. This collaboration would not have been possible without the right technology in place.

 

The Future

Horizon have recently completed a merger with leading logistics firm Scan Global Logistics. The team from Scan who were involved in this process remarked that Horizon’s IT systems are the best they have seen.

This merger means that Horizon are now part of a wider team that has 1.2 billion annual sales with 2000 staff across 125 locations!

On the technology side, Coretek are working alongside Horizon on a major refresh of their cloud hardware to keep them right up to date with the latest technology now and into the future.

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