Johannesburg, 09 Jun 2009
Exxaro, South Africa's largest black-controlled mining company, has significantly cut its telephony bill after installing Vox Orion's Managed Voice Solution product at its head office and mines around South Africa.
Exxaro has a diverse minerals portfolio, including coal, iron ore, mineral sands, base metals and industrial minerals. With 15 mines in South Africa and Namibia, it is South Africa's fourth-largest coal producer and the third-largest global producer of mineral sands.
“We originally installed Vox Orion's technology at the Grootegeluk mine in Limpopo Province five years ago,” says Exxaro's telecommunications infrastructure specialist Jacques Myburgh. “Once we'd experienced the savings and their excellent service, we installed the solution at head office and it has now spread throughout the group, including to our Rosh Pinah mine in Namibia.”
Myburgh says the Grootegeluk mine alone saved R5 million over five years. Since the Vox Orion solution was installed across the group last October, total savings have reached well over R1 million. “We've achieved a 40% savings on fixed to mobile voice traffic in particular,” says Myburgh.
Exxaro is also using a Vox Orion SMS server at its head office as well as the Grootegeluk mine. “We use it for calendar reminders and other messages to our executives, to help our logistics team monitor truck and train movements and to send alerts if there are problems with power supply or plant servers.
“We're also using SMS to send information about our daily tonnages to production managers. It's a great solution because they can otherwise be hard to reach - they spend their time in the plant, not behind a PC in an office.”
Myburgh says although some aspects of the solution were technically difficult, there were no hiccups with the installation. “Vox Orion has always delivered very good service. The account manager is very involved and she and their technicians did amazing work on the solution. If there ever are problems or our call volumes start to exceed the capacity of the equipment, they usually tell me they're coming to fix things or upgrade before we even notice.”
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