How we refurbished the telecommunication service for a Transport Provider

When the customer in the public sector first came knocking on our door, they were using a private telephone network built in the eighties. In other words: outdated and in dire need of renovation. They use the network to keep their thousands of employees connected and communicating, meaning it needs to be in shipshape. Just the job for Addestino.

What’s especially challenging (and, to us, interesting) about this customer is that there are countless profiles working there, all with their own wants and needs. To give an example: there are employees at the counters, staying in their fixed places. Sometimes they have their own computers, at other times they share a computer among two or three colleagues. But there are also employees constantly walking around, going back and forth taking care of technical maintenance and services.

All these employees work in different ways, and therefore have different communication demands. So we started by mapping them. All of them. This was the only way to find out how the employees worked and what their specific needs were—essential information we needed to work our way through this particular case.

This data was combined with a technical, operational and financial audit to draft a Request For Proposal. Which we used to clearly explain to the market which functionalities the company’s new communication system would definitely be needing.

After careful analysis and objectively comparing suppliers, we decided our customer would be best off working with Microsoft Teams.

To support the migration trajectory, we applied the insights obtained from mapping user profiles. Over the years, employees had developed a completely different way of working than originally and officially intended. Many employees with their own laptops were still using landlines, while others without their own computers were already using their personal cells for work anyway. To bridge the gap: the customer’s communication network now consists of mobile phones and Teams, since this proved to be the way par excellence to meet the employees’ needs. The business case speaks for itself:

• New functionality: working at home, desk sharing, name-based calling, presence based collaboration, easier forwarding-voicemail-basic call groups, ….
• Better governance: improved service levels with formal SLAs (versus none in the past), transparent reporting, …
• Contained costs: total budget did not increase, actually a saving of >1M€ could be realised and has been re-invested in other projects.

Addestino: from complexity to clarity. Maybe even simplicity? We’ll leave it to you to decide.