Awards Highlight Exemplary IP Telephony Projects

Attention to basics, emphasis on end-user functionality proved the key to success The transition to IP telephony is rightly feared as accident-prone. It can fall victim to any combination of inadequate planning, faulty team coordination, data network inadequacies, and integrator inexperience.So when the 2004 edition of the annual Telemanagement Live conference (www.telemanagementlive.com) handed out awards to two Canadian network managers for their successful IP telephony installations, there were sure to be useful lessons. It turns out that on-time, on-budget IP telephony projects with solid returns on investment really are possible. Indeed, our two winners excelled in the two primary requirements for success in IP telephony: get all the basics right and give special attention to improving end-user productivity. City of CoquitlamRick Adams, Manager of Information and Communications Technology for the City of Coquitlam, B.C., was named Telecom Manager of the Year. Adams’ most important telecom achievement to date: initiating and supervising to completion the transition from an expensive and difficult-to-manage hybrid telecom environment to a unified one based on IP. The central piece was deployment of a Nortel Networks IP telephony system. The two-year, $1-million project, completed on time and on budget last year, will save the city $300,000 a year in Centrex and associated costs, and pay for itself in less than four years. "We’ll definitely be paying back the investment well within the life expectancy of the equipment," Adams says. "In fact, it will probably pay for itself twice over before it needs replacement." The new technology makes telecom "sustainable" within Coquitlam’s operating budget, since the annual savings will pay for future equipment upgrades. As Adams says, "We’ll no longer have to go to Council to ask for new money for telecom. It takes the burden off the taxpayer." The direct cost savings are only part of the story—in fact not even the main part, according to Adams. For one thing, his deliberately conservative Return on Investment (ROI) calculations do not factor in less easily quantifiable improvements in employee efficiency and effectiveness, which were the real point of the project, he says. His innovative approach to selecting vendor and product is also noteworthy. Centrex ConversionCoquitlam, a fast-growing city located 20 miles east of Vancouver, has a population of slightly more than 115,000 and a civic workforce of 1,100. Until it began cutting over to the Nortel IP telephone system in May 2003, Adams’ department supported a variety of equipment and services. Most voice services were provided through Centrex. But there were also small PBXs at fire stations and key systems at smaller offices. Mixed environments of this kind typically cost more to maintain simply because they require more in-house skills and outside services. In the Centrex environment, there was no cost to buy and maintain customer premises equipment, except the firewall. Even so, "Centrex was a fairly expensive solution for us in terms of annual cost," Adams notes. The city also had to rely on the service provider, Telus, to do Moves, Adds, and Changes, which inevitably involved long waits. As a result, it tended to make only essential changes and keep configurations simple. In addition, it wasn’t easy to set up and take down phone services to meet seasonal needs—phones for swimming pools in summer, for example—or to move critical services to backup locations in emergencies. Adams and his team set out in 2002 to find a new solution that would reduce operating costs and management headaches, and, most importantly, help improve collaboration among city employees and make them more responsive to residents. That it would be an IP solution was decided fairly early in the process. End-User Input"We chose an IP infrastructure because we needed to be dynamic," says Michel Labelle, Supervisor of Network and Client Services. "We were looking for an architecture that would allow us to very quickly adapt to community needs and demands." How the city ultimately chose its IP telephony vendor is instructive. Business functionality and ease of use were primary drivers. "We really saw this as a business solution," Adams stresses, "not a technology solution." After issuing a Request for Proposals, the telecom group focused in on three candidates. Then it made an unorthodox move: it took a team of 20 business users to visit each of the finalists to view presentations on their proposed solutions. "It was the end-user functionality that drove the decision," Adams says. "All the candidates were competitive from a technological perspective and all were in the same ballpark price-wise." The selection committee was virtually unanimous in picking the Nortel solution as the best—mainly because they found it the easiest to learn and use, from both the end-user and telecom management perspective. Much of this advantage came from the Nortel i2004 Internet telephones, which feature a large LCD screen and an intuitive screen-based interface. "When you look at it in terms of new staff and getting them trained, the time it takes them to become experts in the use of the phones is much shorter now," Adams says. "That in turn relates to improvements in customer service." The interface can also be configured or reconfigured remotely and pushed out to all units over the network. Every phone looks and feels the same, and the interface is screen based. Improved ManagementBetter control and management was a major benefit of the IP-based solution. The Coquitlam system had to support three main campuses. One includes city hall offices, three community centres, and a central fire depot. Another, 10 kilometres away, includes an arena, community centre, and other leisure facilities. A third, also 10 kilometres distant, takes in the main city works depot and a fire station. The Nortel solution allows Adams and his team to manage phones anywhere on any of the three campuses from a central operations centre. The system includes: Passport 8600 Ethernet Routing Switch: provides gigabit switching on the city’s fibre backbone. Symposium Express Call Center to support five call centres with 50 agents. Communications Server 1000 (formerly named Succession) switches at each campus. CallPilot unified messaging software on the CS 1000s. BayStack 460 power over Ethernet switches to power IP phones. Contivity 1010 gateways to provide VPN access for small sites such as schools that were previously not even on the city’s network. i2004 phones: more than 700.The soft benefits are numerous. For example, moving 9-1-1 dispatchers after a small fire last year took more than three hours and caused the IT department some panic. With the IP telephony solution, Adams and his team could have had the dispatchers back taking and making calls in mere minutes, he says. In the past, employees frequently had to get operator assistance to find numbers for other employees and departments. The IP telephone system allows the city for the first time to maintain an always up-to-date central phone list, which employees use now instead of relying on help from operators and receptionists. The new call centre system lets the city route calls more quickly and efficiently to the most knowledgeable person available. On-hold announcements provide frequently requested information, reducing agents’ call loads. The city is planning to implement automatic screen pops which will save agents having to gather information from residents before they can help them. Mobile IT department technicians use the system’s virtual log-on feature, which lets them make and take calls at any extension as if they were in their own offices. A planned call-out feature will allow the city to place automated calls to alert residents in emergency situations such as water main breaks. Advanced ApplicationsThe Nortel technology, combined with the 60-km fibre backbone installed to link the three campuses and outlying facilities, now provides a foundation on which the city can build more advanced applications in future, Adams says. They include new network services to schools and to an innovative small business incubator across the street from city hall. One other possibility is allowing commercial service providers to offer low-cost broadband services using the city’s backbone network. Coquitlam is also planning to implement video conferencing, unified messaging, wireless LAN access for staff, public wireless hotspots in community centres, and tablet PCs for warehouse inventory management. All can be easily handled on the new IP infrastructure. The implementation, carried out by Norstan Canada, was not without glitches. An intermittent hardware failure in a switch card took a long time to trace. Once faulty cards were replaced—there were more than one—the system stabilized. Because of incompatibilities between IP phone systems and switches used in some Telus central offices, users occasionally experience echo on the lines. This was a known problem and not confined to Nortel systems, Adams explains. "Employees had pretty high expectations," he says. "As soon as you have echo introduced, even if it’s infrequent, they feel it’s a step backward. They say, ‘We made a $1-million investment but now we don’t have as good service as we had before.’ " He has hopes a new version of the Nortel software will remove the problem—or he may invest in echo suppressors. Despite these problems, the project completed on time and on budget and has done everything the city hoped. "Anybody moving off Centrex is going to achieve the same savings we did," Adams says modestly. "With Centrex, you’re paying for every call you make even if it’s across the hall. The savings are nice and certainly make the phone system sustainable." But the real payoff, he says, will come from increased employee productivity and greater flexibility in responding to employees’ and residents’ needs. Johnson InsuranceThe story at Johnson Insurance, a nationwide provider of corporate benefit plan services, has many points of similarity. The 125-year-old company, which has 43 offices, stretching from its headquarters in St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Vancouver, began implementing a Cisco-based IP phone system in 2003. The system will ultimately equip 650 employees with close to 1,000 Cisco IP phones. The company’s estimate of cost savings to date from the $1.7-million IP telephony project: $400,000 a year. This is based solely on elimination of Centrex charges of about $35,000 to $37,000 a month. "It’s a very conservative business case," says Network Manager Glen Ryan. "It includes no productivity gains, for example, and there are a lot of those." It also doesn’t include savings on long distance charges for calls between Johnson offices, one of the main reasons for choosing an IP solution in the first place. Although not all of the private Wide Area Network (WAN) links are in place yet, the company has begun to see long distance savings, and Ryan expects them ultimately to reach 25%. Only a few small offices remain to be switched over to IP telephony, and they are to be completed in first quarter of 2005. Ryan estimates that if Johnson had been able to reap the long distance savings from the get-go, it would have seen a return on its investment in the IP phone system within as little as 16 to 18 months. The $1.7 million—well below the originally budgeted $2 million—was specifically for voice equipment, but when the company began a needed restructure of its internal LANs in 2002, it deliberately selected products that would support an eventual switch to IP telephony. Ryan gave it a generous two-year window for completion and is confident it will complete on time. Soft BenefitsAs with Coquitlam, some of the key benefits are more difficult to quantify. For example, in the past, Johnson clients often called the national call centre when they had questions—even though most have been assigned personal advisors. It meant skilled The ‘Telemanagement Live’ Awards The envelope, please. And the winner is... A high point of the Telemanagement Live conference, held October 17-19 in Toronto, was a special event honoring the five winners of the "2004 Management & Industry Commitment Awards." The winners were:Glen Ryan of Johnson Insurance for Cost Recovery Project of the Year. Oleg Khaev of De Beers Canada for Most Innovative Project of the Year. Dave Dobbin of Telecom Ottawa for IP Project of the Year. Chris Taylor of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre for Wireless Project of the Year. Rick Adams of the City of Coquitlam, B.C., named Telecom Manager of the Year.Telemanagement is profiling winners and their projects in our February and March issues. Telemanagement Live will convene again this year in Toronto, October 19-20.staff at the call centre, which is mainly intended to handle requests for quotes, too often acted as glorified receptionists, transferring calls to advisors. Now the phone system searches for incoming numbers in a client database. If the phone number matches a record, the system automatically directs the call to the appropriate advisor—with no manual intervention. About 50% of the 7,000 calls a month to the call centre had to be manually redirected, Ryan notes. The time now saved by automatically redirecting those calls frees call centre staff to serve new or potential clients. Weekly reports on automated call redirection help call centre managers ensure adequate staffing to handle call volume. It also shows how many client calls are still being re-routed, indicating a need to better train sales staff to ensure clients understand they have a personal representative. Result: higher productivity all round, and better customer service. Also like Coquitlam, Johnson will build on its solid foundation, adding new applications, Ryan says. Some already planned include call centre screen pops, putting the corporate intranet on the telephone display to improve internal communications, developing Java applications to create a tickerboard display of top sales staff in the call centre, and letting visitors to the company’s website request a live call from an agent—possible now since phones and website are on the same network. Next issue: More Telemanagement Live award winners, including an innovative broadband-over-power-line project, a substantial voice over wireless LAN implementation, and a three-way collaborative network with challenging security requirements.

Awards Highlight Exemplary IP Telephony Projects

News | 01/28/2005 5:00 am EST

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