Case studies: Euler Hermes

IP Telephony solution for Euler Hermes spanning three major sites

"Everything could not have gone more smoothly, its been absolutely excellent. I’d like to thank everyone involved for the enthusiasm and determination to ensure this project went in perfectly, everybody worked so hard, that it was the first time that an IT project and deployment was not only installed on time but also within budget."

   

Server/Networks Team Leader, Euler Hermes UK PLC

 

The customer

Euler Hermes' UK Headquarters are based in Canary Wharf London, with two main offices in Manchester and Birmingham. Euler Hermes is the world's premier credit insurer, offering solutions for the management of trade receivables.

The challenge

Over the past 5 years Euler Hermes’ HQ has undergone a high number of adds moves and changes with office staff moving off site to other offices and back again. Each site has its own PBX infrastructure, their HQ office PBX has been leased and maintained from BT whilst PBXs at Manchester and Birmingham are wholly owned.

Euler Hermes wanted to reduce telecoms costs in addition to investing in new technologies to future proof them over the coming years. Their existing PBX was coming towards the end of its useful life and contract up for renewal. They were looking for a new provider who could support them over the next 4 - 5 years.

Three call centres existed at Canary Wharf in addition to legacy voice mail and billing solutions which also needed replacing.

The time scales for project implementation were 100 days from initial sign-off to project completion.

The solution

Cisilion recommended that Cisco CallManager was deployed in a centralised design and provided telephony services for handsets located at Canary Wharf and their remote sites in Manchester and Birmingham across the WAN. In order to deploy VoIP a new LAN and WAN infrastructure would be required. It was proposed that the LAN be upgraded to support advanced QoS features and enable in-line power to be provisioned to the desktop to support IP phones.

Additionally the bandwidth on the WAN would need to be increased and an MPLS infrastructure was suggested to replace traditional leased lines. This would be very cost effective and have greater flexibility for additional sites to be added to the telephony network in the future.

The routers in Manchester and Birmingham also needed to be upgraded to support Cisco's Survivable Remote Site Telephony, so if contact to the primary call control servers was lost handsets could continue to operate.

It was proposed that each site had local PSTN breakout for making external telephone calls with inter-site calls traversing the WAN. Extension Mobility was suggested to allow users to move easily both within and between sites, still keeping their existing numbers. Extension Mobility would increase the security of their telecoms network, users would have to log into their handsets in the morning and be automatically logged out at the end of the day.

Only authenticated users would be allowed access to external PSTN services, unless there was need for emergency calls.

Alongside the new telephony network Cisco's IPCC Express solution was recommended to meet the needs of the three existing contact centres along with Nice's recording solution to provide real-time monitoring and recording of their key departments such as Call Centres and Customer Services. Cisco Unity Voice messaging was suggested for personal voicemail and group voice mail and MindCTI billing solution to give a system overview of who people were calling.

The project was divided into two distinct phases. Phase one was involved with the complete upgrade and overhaul of the existing network ready for the deployment of IP Telephony and phase two involved deployment of IP handsets and IP Communication applications to enable the new telephony infrastructure.

In phase one 900 access layer ports were upgraded across the three sites to provide in-line power and key communications links delivered for phase two of the project. The main obstacles were time, service provider management and ensuring a successful user migration.

The luxury of running the new telephony system alongside the old one was not available because Euler Hermes did not want to invest any more money in their ageing PBX infrastructure. A big bang cut-over was the only option for the new phone system. Euler Hermes existing telecoms circuits needed migration from DASS2 to Q931, with cut-over of 10 DDI ranges. Additionally all three contact centers had to be functional from day one of the migration.

Handsets were deployed two to three weeks before cut-over to allow users to get used to the look and feel of their new phones and a weeks worth of training provided before migration. It was physically impossible to train every user within the time scales available so a "train the trainer" approach was taken with sessions of users being trained and then going and training their peers. Contact centre training was critical and all agents were trained in sessions prior to cut over. After cut over Cisilion deployed a support team for the week of the cut over to deal with any issues that arose.

The benefits

Reduced costs for telecoms and datacoms infrastructure, with substantial cost savings over five years on rental and maintenance charges. Euler is likely to save an additional £20K per annum on inter-site calls.

Enhanced Productivity. Analogue handsets were replaced with digital handsets, showing caller name and caller ID. Missed Calls, Received Calls, Placed Calls and Corporate Directory are all available from the handset.

Extension Mobility. The Extension Mobility feature allows users to configure any Cisco IP Phone as their own, on a temporary basis, by logging in to that phone. Once a user logs in, the phone adopts the user individual user default device profile information, including line numbers, speed dials, services links, and other user-specific properties of a phone.

Network Upgrade. Euler Hermes had a full LAN & WAN upgrade. WAN links were upgraded as part of the project, improving response time across the WAN from remote sites. This should future proof their network over the next five years. For instance allowing the deployment of other 802.1af in-line power devices such as wireless access points.

Application Development. Going forward Euler is in a position to deploy xml applications to the handsets, with easy integration of their contact centre with existing back-end systems through an open API architecture.