Stagecoach
Driving Microsoft Azure & Dynamics 365 for better customer experience.
The Client
Stagecoach is one of the UK’s best-known public transport companies. It provides a mixture of bus, coach and tram services in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Hull, Sheffield, Oxford and Cambridge, as well as routes linking smaller locations.
The company also runs megabus.com and jointly operates Scottish Citylink. It’s also the UK’s biggest bus and coach operator, with 24,000 employees serving three million passengers every day across 100 major UK bus depots.
Anecdotally, the feedback from the guys at each site is kind of bittersweet. Now the network is running at full speed, they’ve lost that time they had to go make a cup of tea and have a spot of breakfast while waiting for their machines to connect. They tell us everything works better, everything works quicker, and they’re much more efficient as a result. And, at the end of the day, that’s exactly what we want to hear. Their biggest worry these days is that they’ll have to make their round of toast in their own time!
The Challenge
Stagecoach’s legacy WAN infrastructure was no longer fit for purpose. It lacked bandwidth, security, and integration, and offered no visibility into network performance. As the company committed to a cloud-first strategy, the limitations of its network became a critical barrier to progress. The IT team couldn’t monitor outages or bandwidth issues in real time, relying instead on manual checks from staff at affected sites. Security was also a growing concern, with the need for centrally managed protocols becoming urgent.
“We had no way of knowing if or when a site was down, or if it was struggling for bandwidth,” said Graham Moore, Group Chief Information Officer at Stagecoach. “This led to completely avoidable downtime.”