maximiser helps ITW Delfast with the nuts and bolts

Background
A leading international business corporation with close to 100 years of history, Illinois Tool Works Inc. (NYSE: ITW) is a diversified manufacturer of advanced industrial technology. This includes the design and production of an array of highly engineered fasteners and components, equipment and consumable systems, and specialty products and equipment for customers around the world.



Comprising of 750 decentralised business units, with operations in 49 countries, ITW employs approximately 55,000 men and women who are focused on creating value-added products and innovative customer solutions.



One of these business units is the ITW Delfast Group, which designs and produces engineered plastic and metal fasteners for the Automotive industry. The Group's number one objective is to create solutions that save money and deliver value to their customers through innovation and product development in the area of clips, watertight fasteners, sound seal screws and multi-blow products. Some of ITW Delfast's highest profile, value driven parts include: trim clips, hole plugs, hot melt plugs, brake and fuel line routing.



Telephone Background
In the UK ITW Delfast's headquarters are located in Basingstoke with a satellite sales office and design centre in Coventry. The company had been running a Siemens HiPath 3500 PBX with Optipoint handsets at Basingstoke, with DECT handsets on analogue lines at Coventry. As John Burt, Business Unit Manager for ITW Delfast explains, "The DECT phones that had been deployed at Coventry offered us no business functionality. There was a data link between the two sites, but telephone calls couldn't be transferred between Coventry and Basingstoke. We'd have to ask callers to re- dial rather than being able to transfer the calls internally."



Finding The Solution
For ITW Delfast, the driver for change was the fact that the existing lease term for the Siemens HiPath telephone system in Basingstoke was coming to an end in January 2009. 'Ideally, we were looking to reduce our rental and maintenance costs, whilst unifying the service between our two sites,' said John Burt. 'At first we considered that hosted telephony was the way forward for us, we weren't looking at systems at all. By pure coincidence, we received a cold call from Intech Telecom, who persuaded us to look at SpliceCom's Maximiser OS based 5 Series Hard PBX. My management team was very impressed, particularly with the functionality it delivered and how easy it was to use.



SpliceCom Telephony Platforms
ITW Delfast solved the transfer problem at their Coventry site by installing SpliceCom's 5108 Call Server locally to provide a complete on-site solution. Handling up to eight extensions, the 5108 provides the same features and facilities as its 'big brother' the 5100 Call Server, which was installed at the Basingstoke site. Currently operating as two discrete stand-alone systems, employees no longer have to ask callers to re-dial when they call the Coventry site as they can now transfer calls between sites across the BT network. However, as there's only likely to be one or two concurrent calls between the two sites, the plan is to link them at a future date using a standard broadband connection, allowing the two SpliceCom Call Servers act as a single company wide telephone system. Employees in Basingstoke will be able to see who's available to take a call in Coventry - as well as being able to transfer calls and pick up parked calls across sites. There's also a single Unified Directory for external contacts, employees and departments, which will make dialling numbers both easier and quicker whilst eliminating incorrectly dialled digits.



SpliceCom at the Desktop
The Group chose to deploy SpliceCom's latest PCS 570 IP phones and PCS 520 analogue display phones. Both have been installed over Cat 5e structured cabling allowing a totally flexible approach to desktop deployment. The PCS 570 offers a large full colour graphics display, eighteen intuitive multi-functional context sensitive keys, and bold instantly recognisable icons. It's the combination of these features that help to deliver the 'Ease of Use' identified by John Burt's management team during the demonstration by Intech Telecom. The PCS 520 is also extremely easy to use thanks to its clear display, internal directory and ten pre-programmed keys for the most commonly used business telephony functions. It was selected to deliver cost effective display phone functionality for those ITW Delfast employees requiring a hard working 'every-day' business telephone, but not needing the extended functionality provided by the PCS 570 IP Phone.



Many staff chose to run SpliceCom's PCS 60 Phone Partner application on their PCs, in conjunction with their desktop phones. As well as giving employees access to all the advanced system features that the SpliceCom PBX can offer, it also provides Caller Display information on the PC screen in a 'floating text' format. This lets an employee know who's ringing them - and what number their ringing - without interrupting the current task or application that they're working on. And to enable staff to still take calls when they were away from their desks new DECT handsets were added to the 5100 Call Server at Basingstoke, whilst the existing DECT handsets were re-deployed on the 5108 Call Server at Coventry. As well as protecting the existing investment and saving costs, this also meant that PBX features are now available to users of these DECT phones.



Making a Difference
The deal clincher for ITW Delfast was the cost of the SpliceCom solution. "Despite providing far more benefits to our business, employees, customers and suppliers than our existing Siemens HiPath PBX, the SpliceCom system also provides 33% cost savings in terms of both rental and maintenance," said John Burt. "It's also way more flexible. We can choose to route calls based on the caller's number to ensure that they get answered by the correct Department or individual every time. I can also make changes to the system without the need for an engineering visit and the resulting costs. We're only just starting to scratch the surface of what its capable of, but as an example, because of its open architecture we will be integrating the SpliceCom PBX with our Microsoft Dynamics NAV enterprise planning resource application in the future, which will be a major benefit to our operation. The handsets look so much better then those we had before and the system performs in a way that suits our operation. The introduction of Maximiser OS based solution was seamless and all in all we couldn't be more pleased with our new telephone system," concluded Burt.

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