The Children’s Centre may be one of the Island’s best loved organisations, but the same couldn’t be said for its telephone system – until recently. Staff at the Centre had little love for what was effectively an antiquated and unreliable set up, which caused them lots hassle, and which was expensive to maintain and operate.

Every attempt had been made to get the best out of the old system, but one of Chris Martin’s first tasks, when taking on the newly created role of Facilities Manager at The Children’s Centre, was to tackle the phone system.

“Our old system was just that – old. It was designed and built for another era,” said Chris, “We are one of the Island’s most geographically spread organisations - based in ten sites across the Island – and the need to keep in touch meant that we relied heavily on both landlines and on mobiles. Our old system had reliability problems, the hardware was no longer manufactured, and it could not be upgraded or adapted or give us the sort of options we needed from a modern communications system.”

The Children Centre looked around and, in association with their retained IT Company, Island IT, selected Manx Telecom as their partner in getting the telephone system into the 21st century.

“It made sense,” said Chris, “to go with a single supplier, someone who had the knowledge and resources to understand what we needed, and the willingness to work with both us and with Island IT to provide it.”

Private Network

After an intensive assessment of The Children’s Centre needs, a Mitel 3300 IP system was chosen as the best option. Using IP technology, the system effectively gives The Children’s Centre its own private telephone network, via a Manxnet Internet connection. Each of the Centre’s sites now just requires one broadband line which is used for both internet access and all phone calls. Andy Kirk and the team at Island IT worked hard to “clean” the existing network to enable the voice and data to be separated, and were involved in designing and installing the IT infrastructure necessary to support the new phone system.

Cost Savings

All calls from landlines between The Children’s Centre’s ten sites are now effectively free, making a big saving. The Centre also has over 60 mobile phone users and these have been combined into the system, giving the Centre free calls between all its mobiles, and between those mobiles and Children’s Centre’s offices. The savings are significant.

“We didn’t just need a good technical solution,” says Chris, “we needed a cost effective one. We are a charity, and are only too conscious that every penny counts. We worked with Manx Telecom, who was only too willing to go the extra mile and provide us with a good deal. Even better, the fact that we now have a ‘virtual private network’ means that we are saving approximately £4,000 a year which would have been spent on calls between our offices and our mobiles, calls which are now free, so the system will pay for itself in three to four years.”

Echoing this point, Richard Skinner, Account Manager for the project at Manx Telecom, said, “We are not in the business of selling people the most expensive system, that would be self defeating. Our entire orientation is to provide cost effective solutions, and often that can mean pointing out savings to a client, or ways of doing things which they might not have thought of. In the case of The Children’s Centre we made every effort to do just this.”

Challenge

One of the challenges in installing the new system was the need to maintain the old one running in parallel until there could be a secure and phased switch over.

According to Children’s Centre Chief Executive, John Knight, “Some of the issues we deal with in parts of the organisation are very sensitive. At times, it can be vital that a social worker, the police, or a family member, are able to get in touch with us. We simply couldn’t have the system down. We needed to be operational 24/7 in order to provide critical services.”

Benefits

“I think it helped greatly having just one supplier, says Chris Martin, “I had just one person to deal with. There were other unexpected benefits; things like the fact that Manx Telecom was able to share all the data they had about the system and its operation with us digitally – we saw what they saw. As we speak, they are continuing to provide us with the ongoing operational data and information about the system and its operation, which means that we can tweak and fine tune things to suit us best. All in all, it’s been a very positive experience.”

The entire project, took several months, but The Children’s Centre goes into 2010 with a new phone system; one which is highly adaptable and should be more than capable of coping with the organisation’s needs as it grows and develops over the next decade.