About Yorkshire Housing
The Yorkshire Housing group was formed in 1999 and became Yorkshire Housing in 2008. Today they manage more than 18,000 affordable and social rent homes across 20 local authorities. They are a not-for-profit organisation, meaning all earnings are re-invested into the services provided.
Yorkshire Housing’s ambition is for everyone to have the opportunity to live in a quality home they can afford. To do this they are growing as a business, building 3,000 homes by 2021 and increasing the range of services available.
Yorkshire Housing had taken the decision to move 250 staff to a new central location, with the focus on increasing customer service, whilst boosting staff productivity and efficiency.
The Solution
Amillan was chosen to supply Yorkshire Housing with a Unified Communications and IP telephony solution for it’s new ‘Corporate Centre’ location in Leeds, together with a new cabling and data network infrastructure as part of a wider technology roll-out. This encompassed five additional office locations and numerous satellite offices across Yorkshire.
The unified communications solution provided Yorkshire Housing with advanced presence capabilities – knowing who is available to handle enquiries or to call-out to sites, skills-based routing to transfer calls to the most appropriate person, collaboration, conferencing, and mobility for its workforce meaning that staff were able to be contacted whether in the office, at a satellite location or working remotely.
“A key factor in the success of the project has been Amillan’s precise and encompassing project management. The fact that one company has been able to provide all aspects of the solution for Yorkshire Housing Ltd has made the whole installation much more straightforward, combined with its ability to carefully manage not only their own installation but to have provided co-ordination with third parties too. This has proved invaluable, and we are delighted with the project.”
About Lyons Seafoods
Lyons Seafoods is the UK’s leading supplier of prawns and speciality seafoods, providing the highest quality products from controlled ecologically sound and sustainable sources.
Lyons places environmental considerations at the core of its business operations and is an industry leader in sustainable sourcing and ethical partnerships.
Lyons Seafoods operates three sites in the UK (totalling approx. 300 users), two in the South West of England, with a third 400 miles away in Duns, Scotland. The organisation has a wide variety of job functions, including traditional desk workers, home/ mobile workers and factory operatives.
With platforms approaching the end of life, Lyons Seafoods was keen to explore the latest developments in Unified Communications, seeing the potential for IT to become a facilitator in increasing operational efficiency across their geographically dispersed workforce.
The Project
Amillan sought to deeply understand Lyon Seafoods’ requirements and the business environment that the solution would have to exist within. After evaluating several alternatives it was decided that a Microsoft Skype for Business Unified Communications and Enterprise Voice platform would best address the problems that the organisation was facing.
To allow communications in areas of the factory with poor signal, Amillan also worked with Lyons Seafoods to improve Wi-Fi signal coverage which would give them access to Skype for Business from a smartphone or tablet, allowing them full UC functionality whilst roaming around the site. This development meant for the first time, all employees are connectable and contactable across Lyons’ entire estate.
In addition, Amillan provides ongoing training and priority technical support via the in-house Amillan Service Centre (ASC) to Lyons Seafoods, ensuring any issues encountered can be dealt with quickly and efficiently, with minimal impact to Lyons Seafood’s day-to-day business operations.
After roughly 7 years of successfully supporting the Skype for Business platform, Amillan assisted Lyons Seafoods in their migration to Microsoft Teams in the Office 365 cloud, utilising Voice Direct Routing. This allowed Lyons Seafoods to seamlessly migrate to Microsoft’s latest offering in UC, without affecting the daily running of the business.
Amillan, in partnership with Quiss technology, continues to work closely with Lyons Seafoods to help them ensure their infrastructure is agile enough to take advantage of the latest developments and features in UC.
Microsoft has announced it will be taking its first steps into the Robotic Process Automation market with UI Flows, part of the Power Automate application, providing enterprise organisations with a range of automation for their business and customers.
It enables end-users and developers alike to build workflows that automate highly repetitive, manual, time-consuming tasks, also enabling automation across legacy, on-premises, and cloud apps and services. This has the potential to offer automation for your entire IT landscape.
Why Power Automate?
The enterprise application landscape is filled with a mixture of legacy applications and modern services, some running on-premises and some running in the cloud. In some cases, the use of such applications is at the surface level, while in some cases cognitive skills like natural language processing (NLP) and vision understanding are required. In an increasingly connected, quicker, and app-heavy world, there is a strong customer demand for rich automation capabilities that allow customers to do more with less. Microsoft believes this should be a core capability of the Power Platform and are therefore adding new capabilities to Power Automate.
What is the new RPA feature in Power Automate?
UI flows is an RPA capability in Power Automate that enables enterprise customers including business users, technical users, and end-users to automate repetitive tasks across legacy applications — to simplify how they work in a scalable, secure way. They can streamline how they work by recording mouse clicks, keyboard use, and data entry and automate the replay of the steps to be included in more complex process automations.
What are the key benefits of the RPA feature called UI flows?
UI flows within Power Automate is Microsoft’s feature for UI automation. Previously, Flow played primarily in the digital process automation (DPA) space where one could use the service to automate business processes that provided APIs. With UI flows, the Power Automate platform extends to also automate legacy applications that can only be driven from their front end. This allows customers to create complete business process automation. With UI flows, customers can record step-by-step UI actions—such as mouse clicks, keyboard use, and data entry—and then replay those actions.
This enables organisations to:
• Automate in a single platform across apps and services that do not have APIs
• Customize, build and manage UI flow scripts in a secure cloud environment
• Low-code experience with a step-by-step record and playback experience
• Seamlessly Integrate UI automation with API based automation by combining UI flows with regular flows.
Amillan and Power Automate
Microsoft Partner Amillan is ready to support organisations looking to be the early adopters of Power Automate and UI Flows. With experts in Microsoft Robotic Process Automation in-house, we can create tailored and bespoke systems to elevate your business processes.
Contact us today to start your RPA journey!
About Perenco
Perenco is Europe’s first independent oil and gas company, with a worldwide portfolio of assets resulting from a unique know-how in the operation of mature fields and from an ambitious acquisition strategy.
Since Perenco was founded in 1975, the company has diversified to become the leading independent oil and gas company in Europe today. The company produces 465,000 BOEPD through its drilling, development and operations, thanks to its onshore and offshore presence in 14 countries.
Perenco’s objectives presented a unique challenge for Amillan, due to the company requiring IP telephony for offshore locations in the North Sea, where Perenco is a leading operator processing almost 15% of the UK national gas production.
The Solution
Amillan we’re initially given the opportunity to implement it’s cost-effective and high-quality annual Maintenance and Support contract for four Perenco sites across the UK. The contract consisted of services such as Problem & Incident Management, Reporting, Field Engineering, 24/7 telephone assistance and much more.
After the effectiveness of the Maintenance and Support contract, Amillan were selected to further provide upgrades to three of its offshore locations, replacing the current ageing systems with a new hybrid telephony platform. This provided native support for digital, analogue, IP, SIP desk phones to preserve phone, cabling and network investments.
The solution provided was completely modular and resilient to address the evolution of daily business, as well as the ability to expand capacity or add additional features and applications in the future. This also addressed the limitations of a restricted environment, allowing for a fully VoIP solution, or to install Analog and Digital telephony.
Amillan continues to support Perenco’s Hybrid telephony system in seven offshore and onshore locations across the UK, delivering our bespoke services to the organisation.
About the University of Highlands & Islands
The University of the Highlands and Islands is a leading integrated University encompassing both further and higher education.
Based in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, it is a distinctive partnership of 13 independent colleges and research institutions. These partners are separate legal entities which employ their own staff and own their own assets. They are locally based and rooted in communities, but with national and international reach, as part of a regional university structure.
The reputation of the institution is built on an innovative approach to learning with a distinctive research and curriculum – all enriched by the people, natural environment, economy, culture and heritage of the Highlands and Islands and its communities.
Amillan realised the importance of ensuring good sound communications and collaboration was paramount to the University as it strives to meet the ever-changing requirements and goals of its students and partners.
The Solution
The University was looking to procure a third line support contract for its existing IP telephony system and Contact Centre estate, across all 13 institutions.
With varying sites being more critical than others and with varying hours of operations, the bespoke & tailored support package addressed all areas that allowed the university to thrive with seamless communications. Ranging from Problem & Incident Management, Reporting, Field Engineering, Service Review Meetings and much more. This precisely matched the requirements of the university.
Amillan remains fully committed to continuing to supply an uninterrupted service and support package for the University of Highlands & Islands and look forward to continuing to build the relationship, whilst constantly refining the services provided.
ISDN is fast becoming a technology of the past with the service set to be phased out by 2025 and replaced by SIP, an IP based service delivered over broadband and/or leased live circuits.
Here are some considerations that organisations need to think about when planning a move away from ISDN to SIP.
This is a great time to define your business needs and document your existing communications connectivity, for example, how many phone lines and numbers you have and where they lead to or terminate. Consider too what currently happens to calls if your lines are busy – are they queued or handled by voicemail?
Because SIP trunks are more flexible and versatile than ISDN this is also the time to map out how you could use and benefit from the new features that will be available once you have made the switch. This would include for example updating your disaster recovery and business continuity plans as SIP trunks can have user-configured failover to secondary circuits for resilience and/or call redirection to alternative locations. At the same time, you can assess your remote and homeworking plans so that employees working outside of the main head office have access to free ‘on-net’ calls due to the fact they are on the same dialling plan.
SIP is perfect for seasonal business or planned changes in call activity volumes such as a sales and marketing campaign so you can factor these requirements in with your supplier – and remember, unlike ISDN with SIP you only pay for the services you use and not for spare trunks to sit idle when they are not required.
Many PBX phone systems designed after 2007 are compatible with SIP but today many users are ditching legacy, hardware-based telephony solutions for cloud or hosted telephony and now is a great time to examine the deployment benefits of these new solutions. Again, with cloud telephony, you only pay for what you use which is perfect for fast-growing organisations and those with seasonal requirements.
What Amillan can offer …
Amillan has the skills and support level to ensure you always have the services you need up and running. We possess the ability to ‘port’ existing numbers over to your SIP trunks, a vital consideration for business continuity and customer confidence.
Contact Amillan today, so that we can guide you through your transition to SIP and VoIP.
Original article can be found here: The SIP Series (III): How do I replace ISDN? (2017)
About Polygon
Polygon is the European market leader in property damage restoration, serving a range of sectors including insurance, property management, government and industrial clients.
For over 60 years, they have delivered best-in-class service, while their constant investment in people, technology and equipment ensures that their solutions are proven, repeatable, environmentally sustainable, results-oriented and cost-effective.
Their combination of people, knowledge and technology makes Polygon the global expert in property damage control, preventing, controlling and mitigating the effects of water, fire and climate.
To learn more about Polygon Group please visit their website: https://www.polygongroup.com/en-GB/
The Solution
Polygon was looking for an RPA solution that could bring significant benefit to the process of preparing, collating and distributing Time Control reports.
The requirement was to automate the creation of a finance tracking report for hourly and monthly paid employees. This was a laborious manual process involving data manipulation that could run to over 15,000 entries. The process was open to cut and paste error and took over 4 hours to complete so could only be justified running 2-3 times per month.
Amillan has developed a solution using the SAP IRPA platform that complies the report in under 10 minutes, is run up to 8 times per day and automatically distributed to authorised recipients. This gives Polygon daily cost tracking data that brings a new level of accuracy to budget forecasting and management with associated benefits to the business.
We are moving towards an enterprise world where highly repetitive human tasks are automated. By increasing the level of automation and reducing the number of tedious, repetitive tasks, organisations can give employees more time to focus on valuable tasks and increase human interaction.
We can embark on the intelligent enterprise journey by automating key business processes using two technologies, intelligent robotic process automation (arms) and conversational AI (eyes and mouth), working together. They perfectly show how human expertise and computer insights can build the intelligent enterprise of tomorrow.
This article will use the example of ordering IT equipment to show how it works. You can enhance quality and reduce cost by using both capabilities to create a digital workforce of robotic applications that automatically run your business processes in the background.
Common issues in manual processes
Nowadays, many companies around the world use complex and manual order-management processes for things such as IT equipment ordering. They face several issues, including:
These kinds of processes make it difficult to get a complete picture of your sales-order processing cycle.
Speed this process with intelligent RPA and conversational AI
Let’s start with a concrete example. An employee’s laptop is broken, and he needs to order another one.
That’s it! The purchase order, with a specific order number, is created automatically because the conversational AI chatbot triggers an RPA bot in the background to create a purchase order in the cloud system. The employee will receive the new laptop within the next few days.
In this case, RPA acts like the arms of the digital assistant, ensuring hands-free order creation. On the other side, the conversational AI chatbot keeps interactions natural and engaging, regularly communicating results to the user. It acts as the ears and mouth of the digital assistant.
To sum up, this process provides:
How intelligent technologies elevate employees
This example of IT equipment ordering is just one of countless examples of how intelligent technologies can speed business processes and help your organisation achieve the high level of automation necessary to become an intelligent enterprise. It’s easy to imagine other use cases, including purchase-order approval or flight-ticket booking, for example.
With intelligent RPA, the first step is to let the bot know what to do, which you can do with a visual interface to create new skills for your bot and define the workflow of tasks to execute. The second step is to schedule the RPA bot execution – to define the trigger that will start the RPA bot.
Then the RPA bot will do the tasks independently, which brings two major benefits: First, by responding to user needs proactively and augmenting resources, it delivers a streamlined experience. Second, by reducing repetitive and time-consuming manual activities, it helps employees focus on higher-value processes, leading to new levels of operational speed and efficiency.
Meanwhile, with conversational AI technology, you can effectively train, build, connect, and monitor intelligent chatbots for the enterprise – for example, guiding the user to the right page, answering FAQs, and executing repetitive tasks. Natural language processing (NLP) technology in the background analyses text inputs and enriches key data for a human-like understanding of information in any language.
Chatbots can be connected seamlessly to external communication channels like Messenger or Slack, as well as back-end systems. With training analytics, you can also understand how your users interact with your chatbots and improve their user experience based on collected data.
Original blog from SAP: Automate Your Enterprise IT Support With Intelligent RPA And Conversational AI Bots (2019)
IoT fundamentally changes the education equation
The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to transform education by profoundly altering how schools, colleges and universities gather data, interface with users and automate processes. IoT refers to the networking of physical objects through the use of embedded sensors, actuators and other devices that can collect and transmit information about real-time campus activity. When IoT is combined with technologies such as user mobility and data analytics, it brings a new paradigm in education. IoT enables institutions to:
• Create new ways for students to learn by supporting more personalised and dynamic learning experiences such as immersive digital textbooks and game-based learning.
• Change how teachers deliver lessons and test achievement with smart audio-visual equipment, digital video recorders for lecture capture, and online testing.
• Simplify operations for school administrators by proactively monitoring critical infrastructure and creating more efficient, cost-effective processes for HVAC, lighting and landscape management.
• Provide a safer environment for students and teachers with digital surveillance cameras, smart door locks and connected school buses.
IoT scenarios in education
IoT solutions promise to make schools and universities smarter as well as more successful at what they do. The IoT has the potential to redefine how students, teachers and administrators interact and connect to technology and devices in classroom environments, helping enhance learning experiences, improve educational outcomes and reduce costs. Examples of IoT solutions for education include:
• Smart whiteboards and other interactive digital media that can gather and analyse data for teachers and students for use in the classroom—or anywhere else, at any time—optimising instruction and improving learning outcomes.
• Solutions such as smart temperature sensors and smart heating, ventilation and air condition equipment that reduce energy consumption and automate operations management.
• Smart student ID cards, attendance-tracking devices, school bus tracking systems and parking sensors that monitor the physical whereabouts of students.
• Wireless door locks, connected surveillance cameras and facial recognition systems that provide security for teachers, students and staff.
• Research programs enhanced with more advanced and automated systems in major areas of study, such as medicine, agriculture and engineering.
Challenges of IoT deployment
The IoT brings unprecedented flows of data, presenting performance, operational and management challenges to the network infrastructure along with increased security risks from all end-points. To address these issues, network administrators at educational institutions need to adapt traditional network designs to provide new levels of network intelligence, automation and security. Schools and universities need a cost-effective network infrastructure that securely handles vast flows of data, but is also simple to manage and operate. The infrastructure must:
• Provide a simple, automated process for IoT device onboarding. Large IoT systems can contain thousands of devices or sensors, and manually provisioning and managing all of these endpoints is complex and error-prone. Automated onboarding enables the network infrastructure to dynamically recognise devices and assign them to the appropriate secured network.
• Supply the correct network resources for the IoT system to run properly and efficiently. Many devices in the IoT system deliver mission-critical information that requires a specific level of QoS. For example, some educational use cases require proper bandwidth reservations on a high-performance network infrastructure to ensure service delivery and reliability.
• Provide a secure environment against cyberattack and data loss. Because the many networked devices and sensors in the IoT lead to a corresponding abundance of potential attack vectors, security is critical for mitigating risks of cybercrime. Security is necessary at multiple levels, including containment of the IoT networks themselves.
Building a secure IoT network infrastructure
Amillan offers converged wired and wireless solutions to address networking challenges, management complexity and offer a consistent user experience. They comprise a rich set of secure services that enable employees and customers to use corporate or personal, wired or wireless devices on the enterprise network, while the enhancements also help simplify IT operations, improving security and protecting business investments.
As a skilled integrator, Amillan blends together ‘best of breed’ technologies and elements to bring you a cohesive, reliable and secure, high-performance network that supports your organisation’s operations.
Having the right network in place is a key part of any digital evolution strategy. We work in partnership with our customers to enable them to transform and embrace new ways of working. Let’s talk about what you want to achieve and work together to establish what you need to do.
Original article from Alcatel Lucent Enterprise: IoT for Education (2018)
About Alstom
In the UK, Alstom is active in the rail, power and electricity transmission sectors, operating from 30 sites and employing more than 6,500 people across the country. Around a third of all rail journeys in the UK are made on Alstom rolling stock, their generating kit powers half of the UK’s power stations, and they operate the only large-scale transformer manufacturing facility in the UK.
Their sites in Stafford and Rugby have been at the forefront of engineering developments since the 19th-century and continue to produce cutting edge technology for projects across the world.
Alstom sought a new solution that would allow it to introduce a single IP based solution to meet all of its telephony needs in the UK.
Due to the nature of Alstom’s business, the chosen solution would need to be implemented across a diverse assortment of sites, from traditional office environments to engineering labs, workshops and even live worksites on the London Underground and UK Mainline train networks.
Our Relationship
Alstom decided that the Amillan’s solution would be the best fit for the organisation’s needs, providing the perfect balance of robustness and flexibility to meet their diverse telephony requirements in the UK.
The IP telephony solution would encompass all of Alstom’s 2,800 extensions across 30 UK sites. The Alstom Rugby system was rolled out to accommodate around 1,400 users in 2013.
Amillan’s extensive experience of project management and deployment of solutions at busy industrial sites allowed for a fast implementation, with minimal disruption to Alstom’s normal business operations.
Amillan and Alstom continue to work closely together, with Amillan providing on-going development, maintenance and day-to-day support for their telephony environment.
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