From 400 Network Incidents a Month to Single Digits: Rebuilding Tortilla's Network

The Challenge

Tortilla is one of the UK’s leading fast-casual Mexican restaurant chains, with 75 restaurants nationwide and 150+ staff at the point this project began. For a business growing as quickly as Tortilla, the network underneath every restaurant is not just IT - it’s the thing that lets customers pay, lets the kitchen receive orders, and lets back-of-house actually run.

That network was not serving Tortilla well.

• Unreliable connectivity - Customer payments were being interrupted regularly, with all the revenue and customer-experience damage that implies
• Zero visibility - With no central monitoring, the IT team could not see where issues were happening or predict them before they bit
• No central management - Every configuration change had to be planned and executed site by site, which effectively meant changes rarely happened at all
• No service reporting - There was no regular cadence of reporting on network health or stability, so conversations about improvement always started from scratch

Tortilla’s IT team knew what they needed: a platform that could deliver reliability today and scale with the business tomorrow.

Our Approach

We worked hand-in-hand with Tortilla IT to design a network deployment that would serve the existing 75 sites and be able to scale to 150+ locations without re-architecting. That single constraint - design it for twice the size you are now - drove every decision.

Centralise First

The biggest change was philosophical. We moved Tortilla from a site-by-site network to a cloud-managed one, where every device reports to a single dashboard and every configuration change can be planned, tested and rolled out centrally. That one change unlocked everything else.

Prove It in a Live Central London Site

Before we rolled anything out nationally, we built a proof-of-concept in a busy central London restaurant - one of the most demanding sites in the estate. The POC introduced new connectivity, a new firewall, new switching and new wireless infrastructure, and it ran live for 6 weeks under full trading conditions.

During that six-week window, the site saw:

• Zero payment failures
• Zero delivery order failures
• Zero back-of-house processing interruptions

We had the evidence Tortilla needed to commit to a full rollout.

Rolling Out Nationally

With the POC proven, we planned and executed the rollout across all 75 restaurants. Every site received:

• Redundant internet connectivity so a single line outage could no longer take the restaurant offline
• Failover firewall configuration so the security layer itself became part of the resilience story
• Modern cloud-managed switching for fast, observable, centrally controlled wired networking
• Fast customer WiFi - because in a modern restaurant, customer experience starts at the doorstep

Deployment was coordinated carefully around trading hours to ensure sites weren’t disrupted during service.

The Results

The improvement was visible from the moment installations began. Network uptime immediately climbed to 99.9%. Since the rollout completed, network incidents across Tortilla’s estate have dropped from over 400 per month to single figures - an order-of-magnitude reduction that speaks for itself.

Just as important as the numbers is what those numbers represent: fewer interrupted customer payments, fewer frustrated restaurant managers, fewer late-night IT calls, and a restaurant estate that finally has the plumbing to match its ambition. Tortilla’s IT team now has real visibility, real reporting and a real ability to make changes across the estate without a site visit.

And crucially, the architecture we designed has the headroom Tortilla specified. As Tortilla continues to open new restaurants, the same design, the same dashboard and the same managed service extend to each new site - no re-platforming, no surprises.

Looking Forward

We continue to manage Tortilla’s network as an ongoing service, monitoring health across every site, coordinating new store openings, and evolving the design as Tortilla’s ambition grows. The hardest part of this project was the transformation - the reward is a platform that will keep delivering quietly for years.