Amillan

About Trent & Dove Housing

Trent & Dove Housing offers well maintained, affordable homes across East Staffordshire, South Derbyshire and North West Leicestershire. This includes 6,000 properties, ranging from sheltered accommodation to family homes and everything in between.

Trent & Dove housing are driven to make a difference in people’s lives and reduce homelessness in the region. Their aspiration is to be an organisation of over 10,000 homes by 2022. By providing affordable homes and a wide range of supporting services they enable people and communities to thrive and enjoy life.

The housing association identified a need for improved reporting from its telephony system to ensure the organisation delivers the services that it offers to its clients. This included peak-time staffing of phones, extended service hours, outbound calling and ‘first point of contact’ resolution. In addition, a new LAN solution was required by Trent & Dove Housing, to both support the communication solution and protect against system failures that would result in SLA failures for the housing association.

The Solution

Amillan implemented Unified Communications and Contact Centre platform with a total of 213 users and 20 contact centre agents, and a replacement LAN solution to support it. The Unified Communications solution provides a call distribution system operating across all sites by routing calls to the first available qualified staff member in the shortest time.

Amillan also replaced Trent & Dove Housing’s multiple telephony systems with a single solution distributed across all sites, which provided a platform to support hot-desking, home working, remote contact centre agents, audio and video conferencing. The solution also gave the housing association a single, centralised management system for their communication platform.

The LAN solution provided abundant network bandwidth for voice, data and UC, with the additional requirement to support video over IP. Amillan designed and implemented a network that is resilient so in the event of an appliance failure, the fibre route will be maintained, and Trent & Dove Housing’s SLAs will not be affected.

After just three months of the system going live, Trent & Dove Housing reported a 50% reduction in time taken to answer calls; from 45 seconds to just 22 seconds. In addition, the average call length was reduced by 25%, helping Trent & Dove achieve their objective of faster call resolution. This improvement in answering time also reduced the abandoned call rate from 25% previously, to 8% on the new solution.

Amillan’s solution also provided a reduction in costs for Trent & Dove Housing. With the single system replacing multiple legacy systems, the ongoing maintenance costs were greatly reduced. The rationalised solution provided Trent & Dove Housing with a central management system which reduced operational costs and simplified the administration of the communications system.

“We selected Amillan’s solution on the basis of the wealth of features the solution provides, which we felt would increase our levels of customer service and boost the productivity of our staff.”

About James Cropper

James Cropper is a world-class advanced materials and paper products group, with an operational reach in over 50 countries. Using materials from cotton and wood to carbon fibre they support industries from packaging to digital imaging and aerospace with products that are at the cutting edge of performance.

The business is renowned globally for its dedicated responses to custom projects and its award-winning commitment to the highest standards of sustainability.

The Project

James Cropper engaged Amillan to assist them in meeting several business objectives with a full upgrade of their corporate LAN and communications infrastructure.

During the pre-consultative excursive that Amillan carried out to design the best LAN solution for James Cropper, they mapped the wireless profile of the busy manufacturing site and developed a bespoke LAN & WLAN design that highlighted potential sources of interference.

In doing so, the deployed solution would then be able to prioritize important traffic and minimize latency for key applications, thus safeguarding core production activities.

In 2018 Amillan successfully implemented a new Alcatel-Lucent Data Networking solution at the main campus on time and within budget, subsequently moving on to support the expansion of the new LAN and WLAN out to remote sites across the world.

With their new robust LAN solution, James Cropper could also deploy Alcatel Lucent Enterprise’s OTNS to centrally monitor all alarms and trigger notifications, from multiple sources. This provided them with a critical health and safety function for all one workers across the site.

James Cropper are now capitalizing on their LAN networking investment as an enabler for business growth, with the procurement of more advanced manufacturing technology and introduction of unified communications lead smarter working initiatives.

Your network is facing a rapidly evolving threat landscape full of modern applications, exploits, malware, and attack strategies that can avoid traditional methods of detection. Threats are delivered via applications that:

Dynamically hop ports

Use non-standard ports

Tunnel within other applications

Hide within proxies, SSL or other types of encryption

Additionally, your enterprise is exposed to targeted and customised malware, which can easily pass undetected through traditional antivirus solutions.

Many of the above may be stopped by your existing firewall solution, but how many aren’t?

Amillan can now offer all customers a free Security Life-Cycle Report, to help you pinpoint exactly where the holes are in your data network security.

By placing a test appliance on your network and passively monitoring traffic for one week, Amillan can produce a custom risk assessment including real exposure to threats, user behavior, and application usage, helping you better understand the cyber risks your organisation faces.

Contact Amillan today for more information and to arrange your free Security Life-Cycle Report.