North Wiltshire District Council benefits from LAN Telephony Solution
The Client
North Wiltshire District, with a population of over 125,000, covers a 300 square miles area of outstanding natural beauty and expanding urban centres. Picturesque villages including Castle Combe and the National Trust village of Lacock, and six bustling market towns make North Wiltshire a pleasant natural environment and an enviable place to live.
The low cost of property and labour in the area, relative to the rest of Southern England, coupled with a strong network of local businesses, have tempted many new and diverse companies to come to North Wiltshire in recent years. This has resulted in a high concentration of high tech manufacturing businesses.
Providing all public services to the local community is the responsibility of North Wiltshire District Council, based in Chippenham.
The Council is dedicated to delivering high quality, cost effective services to its citizens, and is committed to securing its position in the "Top 25% of all Authorities" in terms of performance, and to ensure that all Council services capable of being delivered electronically are implemented by 2005.
The Challenge
North Wiltshire District Council awarded a twenty-five year service outsource contract for the Facilities Management of their new council office complex in Chippenham to Jarvis Construction Limited under the government Private Finance Initiative (PFI).
Jarvis Systems and Technologies division was responsible for the technical (data and voice) implementation of the project, and for meeting the Council's requirement for a telephony system was for voice services to be provided to 350 extensions serving 300 staff located across its 3 main sites.
In close consultation with NWDC, JS&T awarded a contract for the provision of voice services to Logicalis.
The Solution
The solution was based on 3Com's NBX V5000 Call Processor and NBX Business Phone range of products, providing the required voice services to the Council's staff located across 3 sites. 3Com's NBX communications system delivers robust call-processing features and a suite of telephony applications over the local and wide area network (LAN and WAN).
Designed specifically for small to midsize businesses, the NBX simplifies third-party applications integration, enables seamless multi-site intra-company dialling and toll-bypass applications, and supports voice message exchange between sites. In addition, the NBX solution provides intuitive Web browser based administration, and an open architecture for straightforward applications integration.
In addition to the core telephony equipment, Logicalis was commissioned to deliver the voice infrastructure - including all data switches, routers and line drivers - and project manage all third party suppliers in respect of NWDC's PSTN and ISDN circuit moves and implementations.
Critical to the project's success was the management of disparate suppliers for the telecommunications circuits, which had to be relocated to the new premises without loss of business service. Logicalis's strong project management and technical experience, combined with its close working partnership with NWDC and Jarvis, ensured all milestones were met.
Project Successes and Benefits
At the time, the contract represented the largest 3Com LAN telephony NBX installation in Europe, Middle East and Africa to adopt 3Com's NBX Call Centre software. The project ‘go-live' date at the start of December 2001 saw the Council's 300+ staff and service base move in a single weekend into the new premises. Logicalis was instrumental in delivering a seamless and uninterrupted business service during the move.
The 3Com NBX solution provides NWDC with a state-of-the-art LAN telephony solution offering a number of significant benefits to the council in terms of simpler administration and management, easier moves, adds and changes, reduced infrastructure costs and enhanced user productivity through features such as in-built CTI facilities, voice mail and unified messaging.
"We found Logicalis to be very well organised, with strong technical and project management skills. This enabled the Council to not only procure a telephone system that would meet its future needs, but also allowed the relocation to new offices to take place with minimal disruption to the staff and public"
Pete Barnett - ICT Services Team Leader