Essar Powers Office Communication With Dell Solutions

Established in 1969, the Essar Group (Essar) started out as a construction company in Mumbai. Since its inception, the company has spread its roots and diversified into manufacturing, services and retail. For a company that runs its business in more than 25 different countries, efficient communication across the continents is a must. Constant mobile communication between the workforce, inside as well as outside office, goes a long way in ensuring business agility and efficiency.

The Pressing Need For A Centralised Communication Platform

Essar largely understood the need and importance for increasing communication within the organisation, regardless of time and distances between the locations of their offices. Jayantha Prabhu, Chief Technology Officer, Essar explains, “We lacked a centralised platform where users from the various groups could communicate and collaborate regardless of their location, and as a result, our business effectiveness suffered.”

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The group had a decentralised communication model, which did not serve the purpose of enabling a mobile workforce. The company had already implemented Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (OCS), after which businesses were able to realise its benefits in specific geographical locations. They also realised that they needed a solution that would federate their existing OCS implementation with their offices located overseas. Essar also felt the need to integrate their Avaya voice and video infrastructure with the OCS. All in all, what the group required was a unified communication platform that would help them get rid of the communication lapses and improve their business agility.

Finding The Perfect Match

Essar was running their communication model on email, mobile and voice communication. The next step for Essar was to find a partner that could ensure seamless integration of the existing disparate systems into a more robust, consolidated format. This led to another search, for a vendor that could understand their needs and support them through the deployment.

Essar went through a series of discussions with various vendors and Microsoft. Technical and project management capabilities were assessed through their past experiences and recommendations. Presentations were made to a technology committee that comprised of CIOs of various business verticals and leaders of the IT technology group. This eventually led to Dell Professional Services being the final choice for the group. The company partners with Dell to deliver desktops and laptops and had developed a strong relationship over time.

“Our experience with Dell has consistently been good on our previous engagements. Dell’s approach to the project had business insight as they are the final users of the technology. Apart from the technical expertise, the professional engagement from the scope to solution design and involvement of various stakeholders made us finalise Dell,” says Prabhu.

A Smooth Transition

The next step in Essar’s collaboration journey was implementing the solution seamlessly across 200 companies, all over the globe.

Essar, along with Dell and Microsoft, carried out a phased implementation, keeping in mind the impact on network and infrastructure of the company. During the initial phase, the solution was rolled out only to senior executives, covering approximately 500 users. Later phases of deployment saw the inclusion of all users, but with limited features like chat and file share. Video and remote desktop was not provided for users of certain locations till the link bandwidth was upgraded.

Elaborating on the implementation, Prabhu shares, “The implementation had a positive impact on the business. The UI of OCS was simple like any other instant messenger and required no user training. Also, since the senior executives were initial adopters, it became easier for others to follow the new culture. We made user photographs mandatory on the OCS. This helped to put a face on the name and users at different locations who regularly interact. They found it very useful in knowing each other.”

Explaining further, Prabhu says, “We had a smooth transfer from the Dell Professional Services team to our operations team. Our team was able to shadow the consultants and complete the implementation with their support, so that we had a full knowledge transfer of the entire solution. As a result, we could demonstrate the solution to our senior management and gain their buy-in.”

Productivity Goes Up, Costs Go Down

The solution was rolled out and Essar seemed to believe that they found what they were looking for. The unified communication platform not only gave them the collaboration benefits that they sought, but also took the company a step ahead in different areas of the business.

The major benefit that Essar enjoyed was an increase in productivity and lower communication costs. “The implementation lowered the need for travelling - even between our local offices. It also helped as a medium of informal and quick response. This helped in improving productivity. Remote desktop sharing and white-boarding features helped to have meetings right from the desk without having to book conference rooms,” adds Prabhu.

The company received positive feedback from their end-users, on being able to be in constant touch with colleagues, who were out of office. Managing projects and co-ordinating timelines became easy due to swift and constant communication.

The company has also discovered unexpected ways to make use of the unified communications platform. The IT team is now managing support tickets remotely by using the shared desktop feature to understand the issue and then fix the problem using remote desktop capabilities, resulting in faster end-user issue resolution and happier employees.

“The Essar Group is currently looking forward to upgrade the solution to Microsoft Lync 2013, which will continue to serve its purpose and improve business productivity,” concludes Prabhu.