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Colorcon Case Study

Colorcon is a world leader in the design, development and technical support of formulated coatings and other excipients for the pharmaceutical industry. Their worldwide network of business offices, manufacturing facilities and technical service laboratories help pharmaceutical companies to design and develop their products, with distinguishable marks and product security identifiers, and bring them to market more speedily and efficiently across the globe. Colorcon also provides global regulatory services to assist with filing and compliance.

With such a diverse global business, most countries had their own local systems and support contracts with few common standards, making sharing information difficult. Colorcon recognised the need to centralise management and technical support for their communications network in order to improve efficiency and reduce costs. They also needed to standardise systems so that teams could share information and collaborate effectively across multiple locations.

UNIFYING A GLOBAL BUSINESS

ONI immediately set about replacing the outdated telephony system and core LAN infrastructure at Colorcon's US global campus and the three UK offices. Over 800 extensions were installed using Cisco's unified communications and switching technology. This technology has since been rolled out to more than twenty countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas. At the same time a global maintenance contract was set up to ensure consistent support across all Colorcon offices. These actions gave immediate and long term benefits of centralised management and simplified maintenance across the world at greatly reduced costs.

Colorcon's employees were also able to benefit. Senior directors and staff could now travel to any site around the world and get access to all their usual services as if they were at their local office.

IMPROVING THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

ONI helped Colorcon to further reduce costs with the consolidation of their European Contact Centres into one purpose built Centre in Dartford. Using the latest unified communications technology, the centre provides multi-lingual front line customer service. Calls are answered in the customer's own language and are routed to the most appropriately skilled agent.

This has significantly improved the whole customer experience with call waiting down and issues being resolved much more quickly. Training contact centre staff can now be a lot more focused on specific skills, increasing job satisfaction, which in turn has reduced staff turnover. This project is also being replicated in Singapore for the AsiaPac countries.

Using their own in-house integration team, ONI were able to provide additional benefits by developing a bespoke application which centralised multiple directories across the organisation onto the phone system. Colorcon staff can now contact any member of the company easily wherever they are around the world.

SUPPORTING A GLOBAL CONTRACT

ONI's global support contract gives Colorcon complete peace of mind anywhere around the world. From their UK network operations centre, ONI is the first port of call for all issues 24/7, 365 days a year. Engineers are trained to the highest level and work with Cisco's on-site technical services to resolve issues quickly and effectively.

"ONI's dedication and support throughout the various projects has been exemplary