Metro Performance Glass

About Metro Performance Glass

Metro Performance Glass, New Zealand's largest glass processor, fabricates hundreds of custom glass units each week across its three major manufacturing plants in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, and serves its customers through a further 12 distribution centres.

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Metro Performance Glass required a network capable of seamless, real-time data exchange between its ERP/WMS systems and remote production machinery. Any downtime risked halting assembly-line communications, delaying order fulfilment and jeopardising tight production schedules.

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The Challenge

Prior to engaging Cello, Metro Performance Glass relied on an ageing network backbone built around legacy MPLS links and single-provider broadband connections. These links suffered from frequent degradation and high latency, leading to slowed ERP transactions and degraded VoIP call quality between sites.

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Even brief outages forced the IT team to initiate manual failover procedures, often disrupting critical six-day production cycles. Compounding these issues, the lack of a centralised monitoring capability meant that network problems only came to light when plant supervisors reported them – by which time valuable production time had already been lost.

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Faced with mounting operational delays, increased labour costs and the risk of late shipments, Metro Performance Glass recognised the urgent need for a robust, low-latency, carrier-diverse network solution.

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The Solution

Cello began with a series of on-site discovery workshops, collaborating closely with Metro's IT and operations teams to map out exact uptime requirements, peak traffic volumes and integration points with manufacturing control systems. Armed with a detailed understanding of their needs, we designed a tailored SmartWAN architecture that deployed two independent ISPs at each location, leveraging BGP-based path selection for intelligent traffic steering and automatic 4G LTE as a backup to guarantee sub-second failover.

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Quality-of-Service policies ensured that mission-critical ERP, VoIP and SCADA traffic always received top priority. To secure Metro's data, Cello implemented encrypted VPN tunnels and role-based firewall rules that cleanly segmented production, business and guest networks.

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During the after-hours rollout, Cello engineers conducted comprehensive failover tests and coordinated change windows with plant managers to ensure there was absolutely no impact on live manufacturing. Finally, Cello's 24/7 Network Operations Centre (NOC) took over monitoring and management, providing real-time alerts, automated troubleshooting and quarterly performance reviews.

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