SANDF uses Unison to cut costs

By Rodney Weidemann for Unison

Johannesburg, 28 Apr 2005

The SA National Defence Force (SANDF) has cut its telephony costs by around 20% since instituting Unison`s Galactrix telephone management system (TMS) solution.

Unison MD Craig Young says the new TMS has allowed the SANDF to cut its annual telephony expenditure from R106 million to R83 million, despite a 7% call price increase over the period.

"We were dealing with around 34 000 extensions across some 130 sites, and the entire implementation took about four weeks," says Young.

"It is the first time I have ever seen an implementation on this scale go so smoothly and I would suggest that the military`s management processes are better than those in the corporate world, where I would estimate a similar implementation would take two or three times as long."

He says Unison partnered with Siemens Telecommunications on this project, which offers the client a holistic view of the entire voice platform and provides the tools to manage the environment carefully and correctly.

"In general, management thinking seldom goes beyond a change of supplier, but the answer lies in addressing existing processes and re-evaluating infrastructure. Network redundancy and telephone abuse are the main contributors to spiralling costs," says Young.

"We have teams on site that consult and do an analysis of the voice traffic, providing the client with information about the network which allows them to make informed decisions about how to best drive down costs."

Young says Unison`s task in the second year will be to achieve sustainability - to maintain costs at around the R80 million mark, as it will be impossible to drive costs down by a further 20%.

"It is good to see government putting pressure on its departments to cut costs, but the public sector is still a fairly unmanaged environment, so we believe there is still a lot we can offer.

"Any department or organisation that has more than 5 000 lines will see telecoms costs being among the top four expenses, therefore if this is managed properly, it can produce massive savings," he says.

"Our success with the SANDF has certainly lifted the level of enquiry and interest from government in our services and has created a greater awareness that there are ways in which an organisation`s costs can be driven down."

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