Saint Benedict is the only Catholic secondary school in the area, educating over 1,400 students and employing more than 100 teachers, in addition to non-teaching support staff and ‘one to one’ tutors. Having utilised two existing NEC Aspire PBXs as the basis for their telephone system for well over ten years, the Academy desperately needed to replace it.
The Academy’s ICT Manager, Michael Hilton, takes up the story. “Having recognised that our existing system was fast approaching the end of its effective life we put together a list of key requirements for a new system before we started scouring the market. Top of that list was the need to consolidate our two existing systems into one to simplify daily management tasks and investigate how we could reduce call charges and line rentals by moving away from the traditional ISDN30 circuits to SIP. In addition we wanted to explore how the features delivered through modern telephone handsets could make our working lives easier. The telephony functionality delivered across the Academy was very limited due to the huge level of disparity between the analogue, digital and IP handsets we had deployed, with the vast majority being analogue handsets with very basic functionality.”
With the install handled by local SpliceCom Community Partner Voice2Voice, with around 110 extensions connected to a single Maximiser OS based hard PBX the rollout is almost complete subject to some minor handsets changes and the addition of a couple of additional handsets.
And how’s the new system been received? “It’s improved staff productivity across the site and enhanced our customer service,” reports Michael Hilton. “Missed calls, call history and voicemail are all easy to access, as is the ability to facilitate conference calls. In the longer term will be able to use the data and reports produced by Vision to analyse call patterns and adjust the system accordingly, helping us to be more pro-active at peak call times.”
“We also have lower maintenance costs as several aspects of the SpliceCom system are now managed internally by our ICT helpdesk. This means handset adds, moves and changes no longer require an engineering visit making them quicker to implement in addition to saving us money,” says Michael Hilton. “The new system also utilises existing Cat5e data cabling for phone extensions, so as we add more classrooms and offices in the future they will be much easier to accommodate.