Amillan

Leading communications integrator, Amillan, has the pleasure to announce its membership of the Jisc Telephony Purchasing service, allowing Amillan to supply their high-quality communications solutions for Education establishments and research facilities across the UK.

After an in-depth selection process was carried out to assess Amillan’s suitability for the Telephony purchasing service, the company is now listed as a supplier on the Janet Network for telephony, enabling organisations to purchase equipment including handsets, mobiles, circuits and SIP trunks.

Patrick Daly, Operations Director, Amillan, said: “We are thrilled to have been placed on the Jisc Telephony Purchasing service as a supplier. This membership gives us the opportunity to provide our excellent standard of communications solutions to Education establishments, simply and effectively. We look forward to being able to service new and existing clients through the Janet Network for Telephony.”

The Telephony purchasing service from Jisc can be used by a variety of Education establishments, allowing them to save time and money when purchasing a range of telephony services with added reassurance of fast and reliable data transfer. Also, fully compliant with EU procurement rules, organisations can be rest assured that they are receiving the highest quality service at the best price.

With the upcoming ‘phase-out’ of traditional telephone connections, such as ISDN, by 2025, education establishments are presented with the chance to make way for VoIP solutions, to be able to cut costs by up to 70%. The Telephony Purchasing service allows Amillan to have a greater involvement of the digital transformation of so many organisations across the UK.

Amillan is a leading solutions integrator delivering unified communications, IP voice and data networking, contact centre, ICT infrastructure, robotic process automation and mobility solutions on-premise or in the cloud.

Jisc is a not-for-profit company, whose role is to support post-16 and higher education, and research, by providing relevant and useful advice, digital resources and network and technology services, while researching and developing new technologies and ways of working.

Click here to find out more about how our solutions can bring your organisation into the digital age.

IM Group is a major international company founded in the Midlands in 1976. Since then, IM Group has grown and diversified to become an internationally-renowned family-owned powerhouse in the automotive, property and finance sectors, employing around 500 staff across the world. The business is built on integrity, relationships and being inventive & innovative, whilst also being founded on a strong Christian ethos.

IM Group Ltd were required to relocate from its headquarters in Coleshill to Fore Business Park in Solihull, bringing in excess of 250 jobs to the area. The move was in response to IM’s current offices in Coleshill being acquired by HS2 to make way for the London to Birmingham High-Speed line.

A purpose-built, state of the art campus including offices and a training academy was to be constructed for the IM Group of companies including IM Properties, Spitfire Bespoke Homes, International Motors, Isuzu UK and Subaru UK. The campus also included an office for Christian Vision, a charity established by IM’s founder Lord Edmiston.

IM Group were faced with modern digital transformation trends such as offering an ‘Internet of Things’ approach, allowing employees the freedom to choose any device and access the network from anywhere, at any time, and migration to the cloud.

Having recently been appointed to carry out the structured cabling systems throughout the campus, Amillan were given the opportunity to provide a wired and wireless network for the campus, supporting multiple voice, data and video services within the campus.

Using the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Unified Access Strategy, Amillan were able to provide a consistent network service and application experience for both wired and wireless devices, offering the same high-quality performance using Wi-Fi or connected via an Ethernet cable.

The Solution also included a rich set of secure services to support IoT and enable BYOD users to use their own devices o the enterprise network.

Based in Kent, Folkestone and Hythe District Council serves a population of 108,000 covering 140 square miles. The council aims to boost the local economy & increase job opportunities, whilst supporting an attractive and vibrant place to live.

The council we’re looking for a high quality, functional, tailored solution for their Contact Centre and Unified Communications, laying the foundation for their Digital Transformation strategy by introducing innovative options for future business initiatives. The council also required that any solution would be developed alongside other elements of the FHDC IT Environment, including their Customer Relationship platform and familiar Microsoft Office 365 environment.

Amillan went about creating the ‘Platform for the Future’ for Folkestone and Hythe District council, incorporating Agility, Mobility, Collaboration and Professional Services.

The solution consisted of implementing a Microsoft Skype for Business platform to provide Unified communications with IP telephony and a cloud-based Enghouse multi-media Contact Centre with integrated call recording capability for the councils 250+ users.

The successful implementation of Amillan’s tailored solution allowed staff to work from home more easily, increasing productivity, and consolidate other services by moving from their headquarters to outreach offices.

“We set out looking for a solution that could drive our customer services programme, whilst facilitating a flexible working culture amongst our staff. Amillan were able to offer a tailored cloud solution that met all our expectations and will enable us to deliver on our commitment of an agile, unified workforce. We look forward to working with Amillan and Gamma as we further embrace Digital Tranformation”

With a new year comes the certification of the crucial Cyber Essentials Plus award from the National Cyber Security Centre, helping Amillan demonstrate its commitment to cybersecurity.

Holding this certification shows Amillan’s renewed commitment to protecting against common cyber threats for its customers and will ensure a greater level of care and consideration. Also a key contributor to the ISO27001 information security standard, the certification becomes an essential aspect of this accreditation.

Cyber Essentials is a Government-backed, industry-supported scheme to help organisations protect themselves against common cyber-attacks. The scheme identifies fundamental security controls that organisations should have in place to secure themselves against common cyber threats.

According to the UK Government, 80% of cyber-attacks could be prevented if organisations put simple cybersecurity controls in place.

A simple virus or piece of malware could result in loss of company and client data, disrupt cash flow and take up staff time. An attack could also put off customers, stop you trading and damage your hard-earned reputation. Loss of data could breach the Data Protection Act and lead to fines or prosecution.

“Achieving the Cyber Essentials Security Plus certification shows the importance we place on Cybersecurity here at Amillan for ourselves and for our customers. It’s an essential consideration in the ever-growing digital landscape and holding the award recognises this. We look forward to using this certification with our services to remain at the forefront of Communications Technology”

Cyber Essentials is a simple but effective, scheme that will help you to protect your organisation, whatever its size, against a whole range of the most common cyber-attacks.

Cyber-attacks come in many shapes and sizes, but the vast majority are very basic in nature, carried out by relatively unskilled individuals. They’re the digital equivalent of a thief trying your front door to see if it’s unlocked.

Senior Software Consultant Esben Ehrenskjold has achieved the advanced SAP IRPA certification ‘How to Build Bots with SAP Intelligent Process Automation’, allowing Amillan to provide its customers with greater IRPA solutions.

This development comes after Amillan’s partnership with SAP to offer tailored IRPA solutions to its clients, formed in July 2019.

The course provides a solution overview and step-by-step tutorials on how to create a bot, from initial application declaration to workflow design, deployment, and how to design user interface elements and make bots run in attended and unattended modes.

Amillan Director of Operations, Patrick Daly had this to say: “Having Esben complete this advanced SAP course allows Amillan to expand on it’s already advanced RPA offering to existing and prospective customers. We look forward to continuing our work with SAP solutions to enhance the IRPA offering to our clients. Also, a huge well done to Esben, who is leading the way for Amillan in IRPA.”

Now having completed the course Esben will be able to create bots in the SAP Desktop Studio, know how to configure and monitor them with the SAP Cloud Factory, and understand how to make them run as digital workers or digital assistants, all fantastic assets for Amillan.

Software robots can accomplish multiple simultaneous activities, tirelessly, quickly and accurately, freeing up their human counterparts for more complex, high value, and sensitive tasks that require human attributes such as emotional intelligence, reasoning or judgment.

New innovative RPA applications are being developed by our team for end-user clients daily. Find out more about what RPA can do for your business here.

SAP stands for Systems, Applications, and Products in Data. SAP was founded in 1972 in Walldorf, Germany and now has offices around the world.

SAP innovations help 437,000 customers worldwide work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively.

Gone are the days when students sit in the classroom and learn solely by listening to lectures. Today, education must be collaborative and interactive. Teachers are making drastic changes to the way they approach instruction, with technology in the classroom playing a major role. Digital transformation positively impacts student learning by opening a world of endless possibilities and collaboration.

Digital transformation is a physical AND philosophical change designed to meet the ever-growing demands of your students, faculty and campus to create a learning environment where everything connects. This is an ecosystem that combines technology, services and security to bridge the digital gap to create collaborative, interactive and personalized learning experiences.

• Campus security
• Information security
• Student success
• IT strategy
• Data enablement
• Student-centric services
• Affordability
• Digital integration
• Artificial intelligence

• Build a strong IT foundation
• Foster successful students
• Create a safe campus
• Deliver state-of-the-art cybersecurity
• Deploy operational efficiencies

Digital transformation starts with a strategy. A clearly defined strategy that leverages opportunities presented by the new technology while meeting the objectives of your stakeholders. The following four steps will help you develop a digital transformation strategy for education:

1. Connect everything to support tomorrow’s digital world Set up strong strategic partnerships and build an ecosystem connecting your people, processes and things to build a communications network that is high capacity, secure and smart.

2. Deploy analytics to automate, understand and save money. Use real-life, real-time data to drive strategic initiatives that improve performance, roll out upgrades and make infrastructure decisions.

3. Roll out new business models “Freemium” software and on-demand services are cheaper, more flexible and simpler to manage than traditional systems, and may be just the ticket for your campus.

4. Move towards a single, simple platform Whether it is on-premises or in the cloud, the ultimate goal of digital transformation is to provide a single platform as the foundation of your network and communications infrastructure.

Digital transformation is creating a world of difference by rethinking the digital tools that are used in the classroom. Digital tools are driving new levels of collaboration and innovation to create a campus of endless learning possibilities.

Amillan can offer tailored solutions that address all of these challenges for your business, helping you meet the evergrowing needs in the sector.

Contact us today to find out how we can help we can implement our tailored solutions for your business.

In many organisations, people spend a lot of time interacting with the different applications of their business systems. To carry out their mission, they frequently have to re-enter or to copy and paste data from one application to another or to compare and verify information from two applications. Robotic process automation, or RPA, consists of implementing “software robots” to automate as much as possible these tedious mundane tasks.

This “automation of white-collar jobs” can free up 15% to 30% of an employee’s time, which can be used more effectively for actions bringing real value for the organisation and improving the quality of the service to its customers.

This automation improves the comfort of employees, and this is not the least of its advantages: the employee who spends his workday in front of computer tools will adhere better to the strategic vision of the management who wants to accelerate the digital transformation of the company.

“Attended RPA,” Software Assistants or Robotic Desktop Automation

Enterprise’s business processes involve many components of the information system, from database servers where data is stored to employees’ desktops (obviously via various applications and software solutions), access to large transactional systems, client-server, intranet/extranet, cloud applications, CRM, ERP, ECM…

Automation can be done on the desktop, where the “software robot” will execute the interactions as the human being does: like a human, the robots read the content of an application window, identify the fields containing useful data, copy them into another window, launch a transaction, and so on. While performing these tasks, the robot may, if needed, “hand over” the person in front of the PC to make a decision based on his or her intelligence and experience. The robot can also carry out some checks on the data it handles: this gives the company additional guarantees regarding compliance with certain regulatory requirements and the quality of the result of the processes.

This aspect of the Robotic Process Automation where the robot appears as a software assistant for a human being interacting with a PC while respecting the business logic is called “attended RPA” or sometimes, “Robotic Desktop Automation” with the acronym RDA.

Its deployment is very fast and the “attended RPA” has no impact on the information system and does not require any modification on applications, which continue to function without any change. As a result, Robotic Desktop Automation’s projects are short, and their ROI is fast: it takes only a few weeks to set up an RPA robot that can save 20% of their time to tens or even hundreds of employees. And considering that the desktop is not going to be simplified by magic in the short term, “attended RPA” solutions will benefit the company for many years…

“Unattended RPA” or Autonomous Software Robots

Some processes can be automated from end to end, by robots installed within server farms and running without any interaction with a human being. A software robot can autonomously connect to databases to retrieve information, apply business rules, perform processes that produce new data, and then inject them into other applications using their own programming interfaces (APIs). This aspect of Robotic Process Automation where the robot works at the heart of the information system or in the cloud is called “unattended RPA.”

However, this autonomous robot remains under the supervision of human beings: it is indeed necessary to monitor the execution of the processes to ensure that they are properly executed. In case of anomaly, it is a human expert, a “robot supervisor,” who will be able to understand the cause of the problem, to correct it and then to restart the robots so that the processes resume where they had stopped.

As they are installed on servers and therefore inside the information system, unattended RPA robots require the provision of some infrastructure. And because they act directly on application data, they need to use their APIs, which requires programming work. As a result, as we observed, “unattended RPA” projects are likely to be more complex, and therefore a little longer, especially when it comes to going live.

Clearly, organisations should consider RPA globally, taking advantage of the complementary approaches: it can start on the desktops with attended RPA, focusing first on the most repetitive and time-consuming processes. The first benefits are quick, and it helps employees to embrace the digital transformation of the organisation they are working for. Then the RPA journey can be extended by implementing unattended RPA on servers to handle complex processes.

Some business processes can even benefit from a hybrid RPA approach, mixing attended and unattended robots to maximise the benefits an organisation can get from robotic process automation.

Bournville College (Now merged with South & City College Birmingham) is committed to ensuring students have the relevant skills, qualifications, and experience required for their future, whether that is to seek employment or continue their education at college or university.

The Bournville College Campus has the capacity for 15,000 students and spans 4.2 acres of land, providing facilities that are among the best in the UK. The campus’s main spine building consists of six floors and four additional buildings that are connected to the spine.

After beating off stiff competition from six other companies, Amillan were awarded the tender to install the vital cabling and infrastructure for the college.

The installation comprised of a total of 4,400 category 6 A U/UTP outlets that incorporated over 200,000m of 10GPlus cable a further 768 category 6A links were installed within the equipment room which were terminated onto patch panels both ends.

“Amillan provides bespoke data, VoIP and unified communications solutions to the enterprise, education and public sector markets and understands the critical importance of building these on reliable, high-performance cabling infrastructure. As a trusted partner to many household names across the UK, we have carved a reputation for making a difference to business performance through the effective integration of only the best technologies.”

About The University of Westminster

The University Of Westminster provides grounded, holistic education with wide horizons and opportunities, so that people from every background can realise their true potential, contributing to a richer, happier society.

The university boasts a rich and unique history and has been providing students with an education based on academic excellence, cultural engagement and personal enrichment since our inception as The Polytechnic Institution in 1838.

Amillan realised the importance of ensuring good sound communications and collaboration was paramount to the University as it strived to meet the ever-changing requirements and goals of its students and partners.

Our Relationship

The University of Westminster selected Amillan to provide new IP telephony, contact centre and unified communications solutions as part of a major internal restructuring and expansion. The aim of the restructure was to give staff a robust and reliable communications infrastructure capable of improving cross-campus and external collaboration, allowing the University to deliver more effective corporate and student services.

Designing and implementing unified communications across the entire university has achieved the institution’s vision of creating communications service for the future, allowing staff to connect cross-campus and giving them access to IP telephony, softphone applications and unified communications tools based on their individual requirements.

Having this insight into the Universities current telephony landscape and requirements, Amillan procured a Telephone System Maintenance contract for their existing IP telephony system. This included services such as Problem & Incident Management, Reporting, Field Engineering, 24/7, telephone assistance and much more.

About Walsall College

Walsall College is one of the most successful colleges in the country – a place where more than 14,000 people study vocational-technical qualifications, apprenticeships, and higher education programmes each year. Their vision is to provide students with an outstanding learning experience, education and skills development to support them into higher levels of study and jobs.

Our Relationship

The college was mindful of the fact that they needed a seamless migration from the old systems to the new environment. Walsall needed a technology partner who could provide a fully integrated solution, had a proven track record of doing so and had the vision to provide the college with the technology solutions to take them into the future.

Amillan was chosen to provide structured cabling, telephony, data and applications for the Wirsemore campus. Working with Amillan on the project right from the beginning, provided Walsall College with a greater level of integration. Our solutions were also able to provide the college with simplified communications and high levels of mobility for staff and students.

“Seamless migration was our objective on the project and with Amillan we achieved that. Throughout the project, we had every confidence that they would deliver what they promised and they did.” – Walsall Collge

Amillan becomes supplier of high-quality telephony services for Education sector

“Attended RPA,” Software Assistants or Robotic Desktop Automation

“Unattended RPA” or Autonomous Software Robots