Europacom.net

Large UK Brewery/pub chain - Hospitality specific case study

Europacom has been the principal incumbent comms provider to this brewing company since 2004. The relationship commenced by Europacom approaching W&DB with a proposition for replacing their expensive and relatively inefficient, dial-up ISDN WAN, principally utilised for EPOS polling, with an always-on broadband replacement. In addition to winning the WAN replacement, Europacom has also provided PSTN, ISDN, Voice Services, Leased Lines, Atlas Management, Aphelion Managed Wi-Fi and BroadlySpeak.ing services.

At peak, the services provided included over 3,000 PSTN lines; 800 broadband connections; and 10 private circuits; Aphelion Managed Wi-Fi is presently live in 46 sites and BroadlySpeaking Hosted VoIP is installed at 35 of their hotel sites following a £50M upgrade and expansion in 2008.

Europacom has worked tirelessly our customer to drive unnecessary expenditure on comms out of the business, whilst also embracing new technology to increase the efficiency of the wider business. In 2008, when it was becoming obvious that the economy was facing a significant downturn, Europacom drafted a project plan to audit and wherever possible, consolidate phone lines:

Objective
The brewery was acutely aware that over the history of their estate there had been demands for numerous different telephone lines to be installed for different services, such as:

• Payphone
• Card Payment Machines
• EPOS
• Stock Management
• Games Machines etc

Whilst these services may have been superseded or replaced, the customer was aware that a number of the lines they used for the services may not have been ceased at the time. However, identifying these redundant lines was not as easy as it first appeared, as there was often very limited record of the line's former use.

This presented a challenge, as it was not a simple case of cancelling lines that did not appear to be being used (i.e. without telephone calls) as often lines for critical services may not be passing telephone calls regularly, such as fax, EPOS, Redcare etc. the customer consulted with Europacom and jointly we determined the best process would be as follows:

• The customer to provide a list of all lines to be included with site name, contact details address, email address and area manager email address details per telephone number
• Europacom to cross reference against lines listed as DSL lines
• Europacom to group the lines in to daily batches of around 50 a day (or per area manager)
• All area managers to be informed of the project and affected lines ahead of the project start
• Lines selected to each day to be modified to Temporarily Out of Service (TOS)
• Email to be sent to Site Managers, Area managers and Project Co-ordinator informing them that TOS has been applied to the lines and to check that business critical services are still available. If there are issues to contact Europacom with line number (collected via 17070 service) Monday to Friday (08:00 to 18:00) otherwise the lines will be cancelled in 7 days.
• 7 days later the lines are to be cancelled if Europacom have not had any contact from site.
• Daily Project Line Status Report to be distributed until project end.

Result
The whole project took 2 months and the project saved the customer over £100,000 per annum in telephone line rental costs for lines that were no longer required.