Sector: Construction / Development
Dale Maintenance is a multi-site specialist property maintenance company that was established in 1986. Operating across South Wales and the South of England, it has eight strategic offices, each with local management and tradesman. Dale operates a Customer Contact Centre that is operational on a 24/7 basis, which means a Dale representative will deal with a customer’s call even on Christmas Day.
In 1986 Dale established its head office in Cardiff, a mile from junction 32 on the M4, thus giving instant access to the motorway network, the A470 and major towns of South Wales. The company then grew to have multi-site operations around the UK, with seven other offices strategically located throughout Wales and the South of England, employing over 100 staff and a turnover in excess of £8 million.
The background
From working with Dale Building over the years CSG were aware of how important the telecoms services were to the organisation, with this being the main communications channel for customer and supplier contact. Following a meeting, we found not only was the telephony system a 15 year old BT system but after reviewing telecoms spend were surprised how much the overall service was costing the client.
Key stakeholders were also frustrated with the existing telephone system supplier, with change requests taking too long be administered and there was no dedicated account management in place. They were losing flexibility and critical support functions which was starting to affect the service Dale Building were providing their client base. Along with this, the organisation needed to more agile system that could easily enable staff to work from different locations and devices as demands required them to do so.
A new solution was needed that would provide benefits to the business, needed to strengthen the businesses continuity and provide a technology uplift. We recommended that Dale Building migrate to the CSG cloud telephony platform.
The service
The cloud telephony service was scoped , designed and configured by the projects team prior to any evasive site work. The sites were setup, over 60 x Polycom handsets were configured along with relevant laptop and mobile soft clients for the staff who needed flexible working.
The business was also conscious of the effects of COVID on the continuity of staff , where anyone needed to self isolate the telephony service was now easily accessible from home and via a variation of devices available to the staff member.
Training was delivered to the core staff inclusive of backend admin portal, device, collaborate soft client and other end user interaction across the system.
Numbers were migrated into the cloud telephony platform and this process was managed to ensure there was no downtime to the business. During this phase the projects team were onsite completing final checks, getting the new phones connected to the network and being available to assist as any support related help was required.
Networking & security
The other work we completed as part of this clients journey to the cloud included upgrades to their core internet service and deployment of a fast ethernet service. The projects delivery team also implemented a number of replacement network switches and configured to best practises with appropriate vLAN’s for network segregation
Due to the nature of the business and its multi-site envrionment, the client had specific requirements for uptime and therefore extended runtime UPS battery equipment was required to ensure, in the event of a power loss, that the comm’s services were kept operational for a 3 hour period. Our team sized the power requirements, equipment being protected and implemented an extended runtime UPS to meet objectives.
Finally to ensure that redundancy and uptime of services were maintained as a key thread throughout the implementation, in order to mitigate single points of failure, the projects team implemented a Sophos XG network high availability security solution that would provide redundancy and automatic failover should there be any incidents on the core operational firewall node.
The result
Following working with CSG on completion of the Cloud Telephony and Network Security projects, the upgrades created a positive atmosphere in the office with the staff using modern looking equipment and services. Any WFH requirements are easily met and staff now have access to a range of services to meet their own needs, whether that be a handset, collaborate soft client with a headset or mobile device. The business now has a more agile communications system that is suitable for modern working and can easily be expanded as business demands change.
There were also some important upgrades performed to the core network and security stack which, as a result, has improved the speed of the LAN and created a faster robust internet connection. Overall, Dale Building now have a system that is better working for them, have a more robust business continuity plan in place and importantly gained a 58% cost reduction over the previous telecoms spend.
