|
VoIP Case Study: Toyota Material Handling |
|
|
|
Written by Adam Gosling
|
|
Thursday, 07 September 2006 |
The Material Handling division of Toyota deals in forklift's rather than cars,
but its Australian VoIP deployment counts 100 users on its IP Telephony system.
Nortel was initially brought in to help out with high levels
of call costs between Toyota Material Handling (TMH) branches in South Australia and Victoria. The result was a new phone system
that will save the company an estimated A$14,000 a year.
The currently pays for ISDN lines between its Adelaide and
Melbourne offices and the savings exclude the call charges on top of the
connectivity charges.
In true IP Telephony fashion, though, the new system brings
more to the company than savings on interstate toll charges. TMH's old telephone systems didn't even have voicemail
now, using Nortel's Business Communication Manager platform the division has a
state of the art unified messaging system.
"We realised we needed a new phone system that would
grow with our business, and spent about a year looking at different solutions
that would complement our existing network model. Nortel's solution was the
best by some measure," said Simon Hoby, network and systems manager, TMH.
TMH, which is based in the South Australian capital, Adelaide, was formerly known
as Prolift Toyota. TMH is the official distributor for Toyota,
the BT Lift Truck product range and Raymond industrial equipment in South Australia and Victoria. The company is a division of Toyota
Industries Corporation Australia
and has three offices - one in Adelaide and two in Melbourne.
Nortel's solution was to deploy three Business Communication
Manager (BCM) 400s, one at each branch office, and Nortel IP handsets for
desktop users.
Nortel G-bit switches at the Adelaide branch power the network and the
handsets with Power over Ethernet (PoE).
Like other BCM's in Nortel's range, the mid-sized 400 gives
SMBs like TMH the only converged voice and data solution in the industry,
providing a choice of IP-enabled or pure-IP strategy.
"We wanted to be able to communicate more seamlessly
across our branch network, and that meant being able to stay in constant touch
without driving call costs through the roof," says Hoby.
"We already had a wide area network in place so it was
basically a matter of finding the right solution to give us the connectivity
and telephony features we could route across the network," he said.
"Nortel's BCMs give us the flexibility of connecting
older PCs to dial-up modems that we still use to communicate with banks and
other institutions still stuck on dial-up, while using our core network
infrastructure to route IP telephony calls between branches and mobile workers.
"We can also use the system for local call hop-offs, meaning
calls that are placed between Adelaide and Melbourne are always
charged at a local rate, even though they're interstate."
"Companies looking to migrate their older telephone
systems to IP telephony often need a step-up to the new technology without
sacrificing any of the features or writing off their investments in analogue
handsets," says Nick Avakian, general manager, Enterprise Networks, Australia and New Zealand, Nortel.
"Our BCM portfolio gives SMBs the flexibility of
retaining legacy equipment while migrating to IP telephony at their own pace,
and a scalable platform on which to base their IP communication networks."
www.nortel.com
Related news items Newer news items
Older news items
|
|
|
|
