South African developer of value-added telephone management and voice processing systems, Unison Communications (Pty) Ltd, has enabled leading local financial institution, NBS, to significantly reduce call costs and optimise existing countrywide infrastructure through the deployment of a cutting-edge centralised billing telephone management system, jointly implemented by Philips Business Communications and Unison.
Unison`s Microsoft based Stella Nova package unlocked significant value for NBS by allowing Philips` voice compression technology to be customised for maximum returns.
"Since it is not possible to control costs without measuring them, we needed a mechanism to do just this," explains Craig Butler, Voice Communications Manager, BOE Group IT. "To solve this problem, NBS needed a tool with which to measure the efficiency of its telephone system cost allocation"
"The Stella Nova solution ended up delivering more than just a measuring tool, achieving several additional benefits for NBS," says Butler. Using Microsoft Structured Query Language (SQL) and Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) as operating platforms, Stella Nova allowed the financial institution to distinguish between hub calls and compressed calls, to cost calls at different rates, to create consolidated accounts across multiple sites, and to cost Right Fax calls back to users.
"Stella Nova can uniquely cost different calls according to the route used and digits dialled, taking cognisance of the location of the site, day of the week and time of day," Unison chief technologist, Mike Rautenbach, explains. "Although there is no restriction on the amount of data available to a user, the option of call record archiving is available. More importantly, live reports are available to whichever manager is in charge of communication, so that immediate action can be taken where necessary."
Completing the project within three months as planned, the first major benefit to NBS resulted from the optimisation of cell routers. "Using Stella Nova`s traffic reports, we could calculate the optimal number of cell routers required per site," Rautenbach recalls. "This meant reducing the amount of units on some sites and increasing on others."
Stella Nova was employed to generate daily summary and exception reports for sites and users that made employees realise the true cost involved and immediately resulted in reduced time spent on telephone conversations.
"We have not only identified the causes of our high telephone bills, but have also been able to consolidate and optimise cutting-edge technology in achieving a cost-effective communications solution that will significantly improve our operating efficiencies," says Butler. "With Stella Nova`s distributed access via the Internet, individual managers and branches now have access to telephone usage statistics to address issues in real time, without the headache of maintaining and managing it themselves. This has allowed them to accurately budget for telephone costs and stick to those."
Established in 1983, Unison is considered a pioneer in telephone management, voice processing and fax server solutions in South Africa and has installed more than 6 000 systems to date.
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