Manufacturing

A blank canvas and a vision for the future

When Asahi Beverages relocated roughly 1,100 people into its new Southbank head office at Freshwater Place, Melbourne, it was building on a genuinely blank canvas. "It's not often we get the opportunity to design from scratch a greenfield site where we can choose exactly what technology we use," says James Parry, Senior Manager for Infrastructure, Cloud and Workplace Services at Asahi Beverages. "At the start of the project, it was quite a daunting prospect."

The project was announced to the business at the annual Christmas party roughly 15 months before staff moved in — though planning had started long before that. Getting there was, in the words of Asahi Beverages’ Head of Infrastructure & Service Management, Ross Harris, "a mammoth project": a genuinely cross-functional effort spanning facilities, the people team, technology and legal, all working to a single deadline. "This was not just a tech fit-out," Harris says. "This was every function across the business working together."

For Wayne Andrew, Network Manager at Asahi Beverages, a greenfield site was a rare chance to start clean. "Anyone in this sort of business rubs their hands when they get told they're going to get a greenfield site that they can build out the way they want," he says. The team had already been road-testing the concept: around 15–18 months earlier, Asahi Beverages built a prototype office at Riverside and rolled out ten rooms of Cisco collaboration kit. "The feedback was wonderful," Parry recalls. "It was a very easy decision from that point to recommend to all of our stakeholders that we needed to roll this out in the new building."

Beyond just these devices, Cisco, together with systems integrator Alder Technology, helped Asahi Beverages see the broader business case for workplace innovation including centralised management, richer workplace insights, and a more consistent employee experience. Then came the mandate from Asahi Beverages’ CIO, John Kelvie, that set a clear line in the sand that no cables were to be deployed to any desk.

An AI-ready secure network

Southbank had to operate like "an internet cafe", serving people who arrive with multiple personal and corporate devices, while still meeting the security standards of a major listed company. "No one has just one device anymore. They all have multiple devices, multiple connections," says Wayne Andrew. So the team’s focus shifted to ‘how do we deliver the best and most secure wireless service in this building?’

The answer was Cisco's Software-Defined Access (SDA) fabric, layered over Cisco Wi-Fi 7 access points. "The perfect solution for us was Cisco's SDA architecture, because it enabled us to segment the network and secure it for our end users," Andrew explains. Every device is automatically placed into the correct virtual network, whether it belongs to an employee, a guest, or a piece of building equipment such as a security camera. Anything that doesn't fit is dropped into a restricted part of the network until it can be identified — turning what was once a lengthy discovery exercise for network engineers into something "quite simple and quick." Together, these capabilities provide trusted connectivity and help secure every connection across the workplace.

The results are material: Asahi Beverages’ team can now identify and resolve problematic network devices in about a third of the time it previously took. Cisco Catalyst Center — described by Andrew as "the brains of the network" — pulls it all together, using AgenticOps to flag unusual activity before it becomes an incident and cutting response times by up to an hour. Authentication is handled by Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), so every user and device is verified before it can reach anything sensitive.

"It's a pretty cool network, and we really don't have to do a lot to run it," Andrew says. Having proven the model at Southbank, Asahi Beverages are now working with Cisco and Cisco Partner Data#3 as they plan to extend Cisco SDA — and adopt the AI-native Cisco Cloud Control platform, which will combine the interfaces of Catalyst Center and Collaboration Control Hub, giving visibility across the workplace tech stack— into its warehousing and manufacturing sites, where a more mixed-vendor environment brings its own security requirements.

Best-in-class collaboration experiences

Asahi Beverages’ brief to Cisco was to deliver a Microsoft Teams experience, backed by the best-in-class Cisco hardware, in every meeting space in the building. "We needed a Microsoft experience, because we're a Microsoft customer and partner, and we needed Cisco collaboration devices because they're the best in class," says James Parry. Every room, from four-person focus spaces to the 24-seat flagship boardroom, now run a mix of Cisco Board Pros, Quad Cams, Room Bar Pros, Room Bars, Navigation Panels, all running the native Microsoft Teams Room experience.

The point of the investment was never the hardware for its own sake — it was parity of experience. "Collaboration is everybody having the same opportunity to contribute to a discussion," Parry says. "People on the end of meetings have an equal chance of collaborating with people in the meeting rooms, and that's crucial for our people." Where the previous setup gave a good experience in the room but a poor one for anyone dialing in, the new environment is consistent no matter where you are.

That consistency has been noticed well above the workplace services team. "We've had a number of senior staff compliment the setup we have here," Parry says. "The comments around the audio and the video quality being much, much better — it's evident in everyday working for every person that’s employed here." Ross Harris agrees: "People love it. They just love coming into this office."

For a business whose core job is to support colleagues who "make, move and sell drinks," as Parry puts it, the measure of success is what he doesn't see: no queue outside the digital hub, no stream of support tickets about meeting rooms. "I'm not hearing questions, which is fantastic. That means it's intuitive."

Turning the building into a smart space

Beyond the meeting room, Asahi Beverages is using Cisco Smart Workspaces Premier — the first deployment of its kind in the APAC region — to turn Southbank into a genuinely intelligent building. Cisco Spaces draws data from Catalyst Center and every collaboration and Wi-Fi endpoint in the office to build heatmaps of where people are working, monitor temperature and humidity across all six floors, and flag issues such as failing air conditioning before the building management system does.

"All of that from a single pane of glass, which is Cisco Spaces," says Parry. "It's saving us multiple hours every day." With a small workplace services team supporting around 1,100 people, that data does real work: knowing the office is running at 95% occupancy on a Monday lets the team ensure reception and the digital hub are properly staffed, rather than reacting after the fact.

We’ve installed a Cisco Board Pro on every floor to enable wayfinding across all six floors — a direct answer to one of the most common complaints in the former Asahi Beverages building. "It's the ability to walk up to a panel, book a room, and say, I don't know where that room is, but I'm going to scan the QR code and use the wayfinding capability built into Cisco Spaces," Parry explains. "It takes the stress out of ‘where is my next meeting?’, and provides that friction-free experience we're really trying to achieve." Even long-tenured staff use it regularly, given the sheer scale of six floors of meeting rooms.

The same data has a safety dimension: live occupancy figures mean that in an evacuation, fire wardens can see exactly how many people remain on a floor and where to direct their attention. "We have live occupancy right now, so that we know if there's an evacuation request, we know if there's a few people left," says Parry — a capability Ross Harris notes is enabled but not yet fully utilised, and one of several features the team is looking forward to exploring further.

A scalable blueprint for the region

Southbank was never intended to be a one-off. Having proven the model across a satellite office pilot and then a full six-floor head office, Asahi Beverages is now standardising on Cisco as its regional solution for secure networking and collaboration infrastructure, with a staged rollout of more than 90 additional rooms planned across regional sales offices, manufacturing sites and distribution centres in Australia and New Zealand.

The impact is already clear to John Kelvie, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Asahi Beverages.  "We consistently receive positive feedback on the reliability of the IT equipment, meeting room technology, and the help desk has developed a strong reputation for being responsive and effective," Kelvie says. "Our team genuinely feels better enabled to do their jobs than they did previously."

For James Parry, the project remains a career highlight. "It's one of the most rewarding pieces of work I've ever been involved in," he says. "It provides an enormous amount of satisfaction for me to come into the office and sit in our flagship spaces... and enjoy the fact that we worked really hard to get a fantastic experience for all of our people." As Parry puts it: "We're on a journey with Cisco... and we see that continuing."