NewsSouthern Rural Water locks in IT budget savings with MitelMitel, a trusted provider of unified communications solutions today announced that Southern Rural Water, a water utility based in regional Victoria, has successfully reduced their ongoing IT costs while improving IT service delivery to 18 offices across Victoria, using a Mitel unified communications solution. Installed in December 2007 by Sage Technology, the solution has completely saved itself through cost savings achieved during the first two years of operation.
Fully owned by the State Government of Victoria, Southern Rural Water employs approximately 140 people, and is responsible for water delivery, managing large dams, operating irrigation districts, and licencing groundwater and river water use across a large region of Victoria. The organisation has major offices in Maffra, Werribee, Ringwood, and Warrnambool, with 14 smaller office sites spread across a large geographic region. Amit Khairajani, ICT Manager for Southern Rural Water said, "Our organisation is spread across an enormous geographic region in rural Victoria. We have a number of small offices in remote rural locations, which poses many challenges when delivering IT services. We used to rely on two old fashioned PABX systems for our largest offices, and used expensive ISDN links for our branches. Our call costs between offices were very high, so we decided to migrate to a Mitel unified communications solution, replacing everything with a more cost effective IP-based system." Southern Rural Water deployed Mitel Communications Director software running on Mitel 3300 IP Communications Platforms (ICPs) at each of their four major offices. The unified communications solution has been implemented as a single seamless system, with automated least cost call routing used to minimise long distance call charges. The Mitel Teleworker solution has been implemented to make it possible to improve phone services for small offices. In the past, small offices relied on basic analog phone services or mobile phones. With the Teleworker solution, whenever a small office needs a new phone extension, a preconfigured Mitel IP handset, equipped with all the same features as the corporate office, is simply shipped to the site. To improve customer service delivery and the handling of incoming calls, Mitel Contact Center Solutions Business Edition and Mitel Intelligent Queue have both been implemented. The solutions allows Southern Rural Water to accurately route incoming customer enquiries to the correct person, while easily managing customer waiting times. Additionally, the solution allows reports to be generated showing call performance, abandoned calls, and waiting times, allowing the organisation to effectively measure their customer service delivery. After hours emergency enquiries are now able to be automatically directed to specific employees, reducing response times in emergency situations. The entire solution was designed and implemented by Sage Technology, A Mitel authorised Partner based in Morwell, Victoria. Sage Technology provides ongoing remote management an support for the entire data and voice infrastructure. Amit Khairajani continued, "It is important to choose a trusted partner who can deliver the right outcomes for your business. Sage Technology have done a fantastic job for us. The old system we replaced used to be painful to administer, and made it difficult to deliver phone services. Our Mitel solution has helped us to deliver consistent IT services to even our smallest offices, and has already completely paid for itself through cost savings. Mitel has really helped us to deliver the best service to the organisation - without blowing a hole in our budget." Gwilym Funnell, Mitel Vice President for Asia Pacific commented, "Delivering services to small branch offices can be expensive and challenging. Mitel's unified communications solutions makes it possible to reduce costs and cost effectively deliver seamless communications services across the entire organisation, while improving employee teamwork." |
