Mazars
From PABX to unified communications and messaging
Posted: 05 November, 2010
Mazars, a global audit, tax and advisory firm, was moving its Cape Town office to new premises. It wanted to use the opportunity to replace its traditional digital PABX with a VoIP solution as well as implement unified communications.
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Solution Overview
Customer Profile
Mazars is an international, integrated and independent organisation, specialising in audit, accounting, tax and advisory services. It relies on the skills of 12 500 professionals in the 56 countries which make up its integrated partnership on the five continents. It also has correspondents and joint ventures in an additional 10 countries.
Business Situation
The firm had some key business challenges to find solutions for; difficulty in communicating internally with distributed teams, knowledge workers who were struggling to cope with multiple message repositories and aging PBX technology.
Solution
“Mazars has an Enterprise licensing agreement with Microsoft. This is the single largest IT investment we have ever made and therefore our strategy is to fully leverage Microsoft solutions to improve our return on investment.
Benefits
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“We have benefited from the tight integration with other Office applications, such as SharePoint and Outlook which we were already using,” said Hurlow. |
Software and Services
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Microsoft Exchange 2010 |
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Office Communications Server 2007 R2 |
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Company Overview
Mazars is an international, integrated and independent organisation, specialising in audit, accounting, tax and advisory services. It relies on the skills of 12 500 professionals in the 56 countries which make up its integrated partnership on the five continents. It also has correspondents and joint ventures in an additional 10 countries.
Mazars, worldwide, is also one of the founding members of the Praxity alliance, which gathers 109 independent organisations and 25 000 professionals in 72 countries.
Mazars has a long history of professional excellence in South Africa, with a commitment to the care of its clients and businesses - some client relationships have been maintained for over 50 years.
Business Challenge
The firm had some key business challenges to find solutions for; difficulty in communicating internally with distributed teams, knowledge workers who were struggling to cope with multiple message repositories and aging PBX technology.
Solution
“Mazars has an Enterprise licensing agreement with Microsoft. This is the single largest IT investment we have ever made and therefore our strategy is to fully leverage Microsoft solutions to improve our return on investment. Apart from this, the “better together” value proposition of Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Exchange was very compelling and although this solution wasn’t absolutely proven, Galdon had a wealth of experience that we could draw on, so the risk was somewhat diminished,” said Glenn Hurlow, IT Manager for Mazars.
“We compared the voice communications solution with other solutions out there, but the cost of licensing other systems was significantly more expensive for a solution with similar features, but far less integration with our software applications.
“From a networking infrastructure perspective it was a big positive to be able to start from scratch in our new building so the entire solution was new.
“Our workforce consists of audit teams who are often out of office, have no assigned desks and share telephone extensions. They sit in large audit pools and it is very difficult for our receptionists and other team members to know whether people are in or out of the office and exactly where they are sitting. It was a manual process to find people and highly inefficient.”
“The new roadmap was a three-phase Unified Communications (UC) and Unified Messaging solution,” said Fairoz Jaffer, director, Galdon Data. “Phase one was to use Office Communications Server 2007 R2 to set up IP-based phone calls within the office, as well as being able to leverage this to Mazars service provider, a telco. This enabled ‘presence’, ‘instant messaging’ and ‘voice’ capabilities.
“Presence shows the operator the availability of the person, whether he or she is busy, in a meeting, on a phone call, out of the office etc., so that a proper answer can be given to the caller. Instant messaging also gives the capability of sending a quick text message and, if the staff member is in a meeting, there is the possibility of getting an answer. This enables Mazars to give much better customer service.
“The next phase will be the roll out of the Unified Messaging component with Exchange 2010. This will mean that Mazars’ customers will now receive communications directly into their Outlook clients.”
Mazars will then unlock conferencing capability for use within branches and, later, with customers, providing easier communication, that will include instant messaging, voice and video.
In the final stage of the current rollout, Mazars will install this solution at its other branches in the Southern African region.
Business Benefits
“We have benefited from the tight integration with other Office applications, such as SharePoint and Outlook which we were already using,” said Hurlow.
“The entire rollout has gone smoothly and our infrastructure team has found Galdon excellent at transferring knowledge, assisting in training and being able to respond to any technical queries we’ve had.
“We now have extensive reporting services in place and can assess the metrics for the quality of all calls. The biggest win so far is presence and this is now a vital component for us. Our receptionists can see everyone’s status and customer service is greatly improved. Coupled with IM, communicating at Mazars is now far more effective and we look forward to the further benefits that UM will bring,” he concluded.
