Pendlebury's Family Bakery

The business

Pendlebury’s started as a single shop and is now eleven retail branches plus a wholesale arm, all supplied from one central production bakery at Walton Summit near Preston. A small fleet of vans runs daily routes to every branch and to thirty-two third-party reseller accounts across the region: independent shops, cafés and farm shops.

Around 215 people work there. Eighty-three of them are part-time or casual retail staff, which turns out to matter far more than anything in the server room.

What they run today

• One physical Small Business Server carrying Active Directory, Exchange and the file shares. Long out of vendor support, no redundancy, and treated as too fragile to touch.
• A discontinued on-premises payroll suite bolted onto the same box. It is the only system that reliably knows when someone leaves.
• A standalone accounts package with no integration to payroll or sales. Month-end is manual reconciliation.
• Ageing standalone tills in each shop, out of support, with no central visibility of sales or stock. Daily takings are phoned or emailed in.
• CCTV and door entry sharing a comms cabinet, and a flat network, with the server.

There is no in-house IT. Day-to-day support is an office administrator, backed by an external break/fix contractor for anything serious. Nothing follows a naming convention: machines are named after whoever uses them, and there is a security group called “TEMP - delete later” that nobody dares remove.

That last part is deliberate. It is a realistic starting point, not a strawman.

Where they want to get to

• A modern on-premises AD on Proxmox VMs, replacing the SBS box. They want to stay on-premises for now, but on infrastructure that can actually be backed up, patched and scaled.
• A proper cloud HR and payroll platform, decoupled from the AD and payroll spaghetti.
• Cloud EPOS with real-time sales and stock reporting across all branches, plus an ordering portal for the thirty-two resellers.
• Batch and allergen traceability, which becomes a compliance driver rather than a nice-to-have as reseller reach grows.

The constraint that shapes everything

Pendlebury’s wants to expand beyond Lancashire into Cumbria, Greater Manchester and Yorkshire over the next three to five years. If that lands, branch count could go from eleven to thirty-plus and headcount past five hundred.

Whatever gets designed now has to survive that growth, not just fix today’s mess. That single sentence is what makes this an architecture exercise rather than a tidy-up.