Telephony Strategy and Implementation

Executive Summary

A recreational vehicle manufacturer reduced operating costs and created a platform for new internal telephony services on an accelerated timetable, with no work disruption.

Case Background

Industry: Discreet manufacturing; financial services

Company: A 100-year-old company with manufacturing, distribution, and financial services, with sales of more than $5B, 13 facilities, and more than 10,000 employees.

Key Challenges and Goals

The client need to significantly reduce capital and maintenance expenses for their communications system.

The existing PBX system was managed in a decentralized manner, was nearing the end of its support lifecycle, and required a costly separate network.

Affinity's Approach and Solutions

Affinity performed a full inventory of current equipment and an analysis of predicted growth and of support costs by location. This analysis determined that the client had more than 7,000 digital and analog phones across nine different PBXs, requiring five separate service agreements. Total annual operating cost in this model was approximately $2M.

We designed a plan to utilize existing network assets and teams to implement a Voice over IP (VoIP) platform, providing greater resiliency and functionality with lower operating costs. Merging voice and data onto a single network - with a centralized management model - immediately lowered usage, maintenance and support expenses. Existing technical teams were retrained to support the new equipment. A critical element of this migration was a sharply defined change management strategy using multiple communication channels to deliver against proper expectations.

Results

The new system was deployed with no interruption to the business. This was accomplished on a compressed time schedule of five months to reduce cost and exposure to risk, versus the initial planned project of 12 months. Some select "power users" of sophisticated voice systems had an initial learning curve that was larger than anticipated; this was successfully addressed with the addition of focused one-on-one training of key executives.

Early results match expected $1M in annual cost reductions. As a result, the project will cover all costs in a four-year period.Subsequently the client has deployed additional cost-cutting and service-enhancing (XML-based) innovations made possible by the new system, outside of the original scope and justification.

Project Snapshot

Technology: VoIP

Affinity expertise applied:
- Business and technical strategy and alignment
- Financial analysis including cost modeling, cost benefit analysis, return on assets and return on investment analysis
- Risk management and reduction services
- Change management
- Project management

Project duration: Five months

Cost: $4.2M in one-time costs, including all hardware and services