Giving back time to your IT staff
Kurmi UC Management software transformed the MACD process for this firm from a delicate process only a certified communications specialist could carry out into a simple point-and-click task. In addition, most errors were removed and the process can now be expedited. The company was able to transfer the MACD responsibility from the IT department to the help desk. Provisioning can be performed as part of the onboarding and offboarding of employees. The effortless process freed up two FTEs in the overloaded IT organization.
Nemertes found businesses between 2,500 and 10,000 employees require an average 3.9 FTEs to manage their Unified Communications and Collaboration infrastructure. This situation is both no longer tolerable and no longer needed in this age of automation. UC Management can take the complexity out of operations!
A demanding distributed business
This large clothing company exemplifies the journey of many enterprises to modernize their business communications infrastructure. It manages a diversified portfolio of brands, marketed through department stores and a network of stores across the globe. Operating a distributed business with a global supply chain is not an easy task. The seasonal nature of the retail business requires a large number of additional part-time associates to be onboarded frequently. The company relies on state-of-the-art communications technology and made the improvement of its operating platforms including communications an investment priority.
The firm unified its business communications tools around Cisco Collaboration solutions, including Cisco Unified Communications Manager for telephony, Cisco Jabber for collaboration, Cisco Webex for conferencing, and Cisco Unified Contact Center Express for customer service. It also leveraged Microsoft Active Directory to help keep track of its fluid workforce.
A management headache
The management of such a sophisticated suite of communications tools turned out to be more complicated than expected. The company trained several of its communications specialists, but each employee had to be manually configured in each UC application. A single configuration could entail up to 20 different parameters. Rules and consistency had to be enforced across the various applications.
The company found only certified associates were able to perform these complicated tasks, which were still prone to human errors. In particular, the moves, adds, changes, and deletions (MACDs) of employee profiles was consuming most of the specialists’ time.
UC Management to the rescue
The company turned to Kurmi’s Unified Communications Management (UC Management) suite when it realized that the management of its business communications tools was breaking the promise of Unified Communications (UC) and taking too much time from its certified associates. The deployment was easy to schedule and took a few weeks.
The company created employee profiles according to their communication needs. Provisioning rules were automated and enforced through Kurmi allowing the configuration of an employee in the various communication applications to be done transparently based on their Active Directory information.
