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About Voith
Founded in 1867, the Voith group is one of the largest family owned enterprises in Europe, with a workforce of 37,000 in over 270 locations around the world, and sales over €4BN. In recent years, revenue growth has been running at about nine percent year-on-year, in part driven by an aggressive acquisitions strategy. Product innovation and customer service has been the success mantra for the company. For Voith Paper, cost, speed of delivery, and after-sales service are the strategic battlegrounds on which commercial success is won. Competition in its markets is fierce and getting fiercer.
Voith Paper acknowledged the fact that along with addressing increasing design complexity it had to also look at the time to deliver. As it took pride on its after sales support service, it had to ensure streamlined local offices close to customers within a region to ensure successful installations and ongoing customer service. Collaboration within the company was the key, but the existing network infrastructure could not support it.
Disparate Legacy Infrastructure
In 2006, Voith decided to build two new buildings at its regional campus in Austria, one for the regional headquarters of Voith Paper and the other for Hydro.
As they were coming up with new construction and the legacy infrastructure was working on disparate data and voice networks Voith evaluated the option of converged networks to increase collaboration and reduce operating cost.
Taking a lead Cisco and its partners, Telekom Austria and Osiatis, shared a roadmap that initially would have an open, scalable, robust, and secure network as the platform to support the services the company needed both today and in the future. Once built, the platform would support a wide range of rich media services that could increase collaboration, reduce costs, and increase business agility.
Bag Of Solutions
Star Based to Double Star Optical Fiber
Two projects were undertaken wherein the first “star-based” network was replaced with a double star optical fiber backbone based on Cisco equipment. As a result the bandwidth went up from 1 to 10Gbps, and provided redundant connections between buildings, including the main data center and another back-up facility on the campus. A Cisco-based LAN designed by Osiatis served the 300 employees at each of the two new buildings.
Then came the converged infrastructure, with voice and data services running on the campus and to the branches. Erich Seher, Voith Paper Austria’s chief information officer, says: “With globalisation comes an increasing need for collaboration. We wanted to build a network infrastructure that would not only support our day-to-day operations, but would also be the secure foundation on which to build the new services that our employees need.”
Managed Voice service
The company required a managed voice service contract with a set price per port, per phone, and per month.
“It was important that we bought a voice service rather than a phone,” says Seher, “one that could be extended throughout Austria and to other countries in our region.” A managed voice service enabled better cashflow management, with no unexpected operating costs. As the managing was outsourced to the service provider the internal IT team could focus on developing better collaboration tools. The company had implemented Microsoft Active Directory throughout the world, and any solution also had to tightly integrate with Voith’s standard desktop environment, which was based around Microsoft applications. In particular, Voith was looking for “click to dial” functionality from Microsoft Outlook.
Two Cisco Unified Communications Manager platforms were installed on the campus to provide voice and associated messaging services. Voice and data services were extended to two other Austrian branches over Telekom Austria’s managed MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) WAN.
Integrated Legacy System
Telekom Austria integrated the new voice platform was into the legacy system, providing feature transparency such as caller ID and callback, thereby protecting the previous investment. Extending Collaboration with Presence Information The company was also using Microsoft Live Communications Server and wanted a voice solution that was able to extend presence information to the Microsoft server so that it could be integrated onto the desktop.
Jürgen Bichler, head of IT infrastructure, says: “We trusted Cisco more than other vendors to be committed to supporting this upcoming new technology, and this influenced our decision to select Cisco as our voice platform. They were the only vendor that responded to the tender with an out-of-the-box presence solution—Cisco Presence Server— that would integrate with Microsoft’s.”
Benefits
Significant reduction in costs and complexity, improved collaboration and improved customer services are some of the benefits accrued from the new converged solution.
Reduced Total Cost of Ownership
The cost of voice services will be reduced by 20 percent over the five years of the managed unified communications contract with Telekom Austria, delivering total savings of €130,000. The expense of calls to mobile phones has also been reduced by 43 percent equating to €220,000 a year by aggregating calls to the mobile operator offering the best service package.
Voith also benefited by taking advantage of a three-year lease from Cisco Capital on the LAN solution, which offered competitive terms and the opportunity for a technology refresh at the end of the contract. By basing the residual value of the equipment covered by the lease in line with the economic life of the assets, Cisco Capital was able to reduce Voith’s operating costs to a minimum.
Reduced Design Time
The noteworthy benefit for Voith was the reduced time to design a complex, custom made printing machine from 24 to 18 months. Seher expressed that with the globalization of Voith’s markets and operations, collaboration between design teams and experts around the world has led to reduced design time for their printing machines. By moving to an IP-based infrastructure, Voith will be better able to meet its teams’ increasing demands for media-rich and Web-based tools such as shared portals and applications. “This is very important for a company whose experts can be almost anywhere in the world, advising customers and troubleshooting issues.”
The Road Ahead
New LANs are being installed in every building on the campus, and voice and data services are to be extended to three additional branches in Austria and, beyond.
By simply installing Cisco router and providing the offices with Cisco IP Phones, Voith’s various branch offices have been seamlessly integrated into the solution.
Cisco Unified Personal Communicator is also being piloted to provide a softphone and rich-media communications for Voith staff working at customers’ locations as remote as Mongolia, using a secure connection to corporate resources over the Internet.
Voith is also evaluating Wireless access to network-based resources for more mobility to the employees. There are also plans to make use of a new generation of wireless-enabled mobile phones. Legacy DECT phones will be replaced with wireless enabled GSM phones able to access the campus WLAN.