Pall-Ex Group – Data Platform Performance Optimisation|Professional services
Optimising Pall-Ex Group’s systems for efficiency and scalability.
As Pall-Ex Group scaled across regions and prepared for further growth, it set out to ensure its central data platform could handle increasing demand and continue to operate efficiently.
At a Glance Summary
Customer: Pall-Ex Group operate a network of quality hauliers across the UK & Europe, transporting 7 million pallets globally.
Challenge: As Pall-Ex Group scaled across regions and prepared for further growth, it set out to ensure its central data platform could handle increasing demand and continue to operate efficiently. To keep operations smooth and resilient, Pall-Ex Group looked for external support that could help elevate performance and prepare the platform for the next steps in its strategy.
Solution: Expert configuration tuning, indexing & code optimisation, licensing changes, and high-availability offload.
Outcome: Performance gains, lower blocking and resource contention, and improved data platform stability.
The Detail
The Challenge
Pall-Ex Group is one of the UK’s leading palletised freight distribution networks, offering a complete logistics solution through a network of independent hauliers. Its operations rely on a central, mission-critical data platform that supports the rapidly growing, internationally expanding business. As the network has grown and plans for a new flagship headquarters emerged, activity on Pall-Ex Group’s data platform has increased steadily. This was a natural result of the success and scale of the business, but it highlighted the need for optimisation to keep performance and uptime protected and scalable. Pall-Ex Group reached out to us for support to future-proof its platform so it could confidently keep pace with its projected growth.
Our Approach & Solution
We began with a detailed assessment of the entire Data Platform. This included reviewing virtualisation software, host settings, licensing, database configuration, indexing strategy, and query execution plans. Based on that, we proposed and implemented the following plan:
- Review licensing settings so the platform could utilise all available CPUs.
- Upgrade virtualisation software storage controllers to align with best practices, improving disk throughout.
- Consolidate and remove low-value indexes, refine indexing strategy.
- Re-engineer the most memory-intensive stored procedure to reduce memory footprint.
- Enable advanced database settings to reduce compile locks and blocking.
- Offload read-only workloads to the Availability Group secondary replica.
- Tune parallelism, apply database best practices, and introduce a listener to support read-only routing.
- Recommend a future upgrade to the latest data platform version to take advantage of the most advanced and latest features.
We worked in close collaboration with the Pall-Ex Group IT team, phasing in these changes over a short period of time to monitor improvements in real time.
The Results
By the end of the implementation week, Pall-Ex Group saw significant and measurable progress. Here’s what the optimisations delivered:
- Higher throughput & responsiveness: virtualisation software controller adjustments improved disk I/O and response times.
- Memory reduction: The rewritten procedure slashed memory usage by ~80%.
- Reduced blocking / compile waits: By enabling advanced settings, compile locks were effectively eliminated.
- Consistent CPU usage: Licensing changes enabled more stable, full-CPU utilisation.
- Load distribution: Read-only queries were redirected to the secondary, easing load on the primary.
- Additional gains: Better CPU parallelism, cleaner index set, healthier database, and read-only routing support.
These improvements together meant users continued to depend on predictable and fast database performance, which enhanced Pall-Ex Group’s operational efficiency even further.
Looking Ahead
Coeo is now retained as a Managed Service partner for Pall-Ex Group. We regularly review performance trends, recommend further index and query enhancements, and advise on future upgrades or expansions as the business continues to grow. The next major milestone is an upgrade to the latest version of the data platform and full support going forward as Pall-Ex Group evolves.
Why Coeo?
At Coeo, we specialise in making data platforms both resilient and high performing. Whether your data platform is struggling under load, or you’re planning to scale and modernise, we bring deep technical expertise, thoughtful planning, and a collaborative mindset to every project.
Let us help you turn your data platform from a bottleneck into a business enabler.
Get in touch to see how Coeo can support your performance and stability goals.
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