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Strathclyde FRS to improve management of 3000 telephone extensions at over 100 sites
Strathclyde Fire and Rescue has taken the first step to improve dialling plans, reduce potential fraud and support a major VoIP migration project.
As part of the infrastructure network services team, Senior Communication Engineer at Strathclyde FRS Richard Goudie and his eight colleagues support over 100 locations and communications for over 3,000 staff across the region.
Sites include large control centres in Hamilton and Johnstone that use a Cisco Call Manager, as well as many smaller offices using a variety of PBX's with minimal IP connectivity.
The organisation is in the midst of a major migration to a full VoIP solution in a bid to reduce costs and improve the contactability needed in the delivery of critical emergency services and community health and safety initiatives. But with just nine members in the network infrastructure team covering such a large and geographically dispersed organisation, the team needed a better call logging and reporting platform to help it analyse and monitor communication processes. The call management platform also needed to provide a self service element to allow the team to devolve reporting down to the key stakeholders.
After a formal tender process, Tiger 2020 was selected based on its flexibility, ease of use and compatibility with both Cisco and other third party PBX systems to provide visibility across disparate telephony systems. “In fact, it was Cisco that recommended Tiger to us in the first place,” said Richard Goudie, who added that the Tiger 2020 solution was initially deployed to support two Cisco Call Manager sites.
The statistical reporting from Tiger 2020 has also helped the team to strengthen the proposal for the full VoIP implementation planned over the next year. “We need data to justify a business case and work out calling plans and the detailed reporting from Tiger 2020 has been instrumental in this phase of the project,” explained Richard Goudie.
In phase two, the network infrastructure services team hopes to devolve reporting down to departmental and site managers to allow fund holders to better regulate communication budgets. “The system has proven extremely useful and has also allowed us to spot a few oddities like premium rate numbers that need to be restricted to stop abuse,” said Goudie, “Moving forward, we expect Tiger 2020 to help us streamline and improve the delivery of telephony, especially as we move to a VoIP solution at more sites across the region.”
