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Phs Group Case Study
PHS increases cash flow, improves communications and builds new platform for the future with the help of ONI
PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE
PHS is one of Europe's leading workplace services providers, offering a diverse product and service portfolio from supplying washroom hygiene products and water coolers to offering secure data shredding. They currently have over 80 sites across the UK with a head office in Caerphilly, as well as divisions in Spain, Ireland and Benelux.
Due to organic growth many sites had their own telephony and support contracts with limited network management skills in-house. PHS needed to improve communications across the business, accommodate growing bandwidth needs from in-house applications, and enable delivery of key applications to remote sites. They needed to future-proof for voice and other applications, improve customer service levels and gain more responsive support from their provider.
SPEED, EFFICIENCY AND FLEXIBILITY
In order to deliver the benefits that PHS were looking for, ONI had to redesign the core infrastructure. Using a combination of Cisco's Unified Communications technology and MPLS from BT, ONI delivered a solution that enabled PHS to greatly improve the network they had today but also provide a platform to grow as users requirements changed in the future.
Network and telephony management is now centralised in Caerphilly, with unified communications providing simple control over configuration and call routing right down to branch level. This is standardising technology across the business giving much more flexibility so that new sites and home working can be easily deployed. The new network also increases bandwidth and speed giving users faster access to core business applications. Within a very tight two-month window, ONI delivered the new service in record time migrating over 80 sites to the new network. PHS and ONI were able to move all services across and keep the business going throughout the project without any downtime.
IMPROVING THE CASH BALANCE
With over 200,000 customers, the 20-strong PHS credit control team spend much of their time phoning customers to get progress updates and resolve invoice issues. PHS needed to increase the number of calls the credit control team could make in an hour, to reduce debtor days and improve cash balance, thus enabling business growth.
ONI implemented an outbound dialer solution using Magnetic North software which automated the call scheduling process. It prioritises calls based on two key factors
