Success Stories

Group Dekko

Industry: Diversified Manufacturing
Telephone System: Call Manager
Cisco Solution: Call Manager

Early Adoption, Wide Reach:

eUS stretched an informal call center across international borders and linked up 27 sites in a trail-blazing Call Manager VoIP deployment for Group Dekko.

Scenario:
Multinational, multi-industry manufacturing group has expiring lease on 30 Fujitsu PBXs, due to be orphaned by the vendor Fujitsu, and the customer is looking for a solution.

Solution Elements:
Cisco Call Manager, IP Call Center Express, Unity Unified Messaging, Personal Assistant Call Handling, Cisco Router voice cards, Promim, Cisco Point-to-Point wireless bridges

Results:

• Telecom costs cut 20%
  
• Informal call center with prerouting IVR can now serve multiple divisions, distributing calls throughout network, maximizing human resource potential and presenting one-company appearance
  
• Employees can take their extensions (forward calls) with them wherever they go
  
• Employees can reach email, voice mail, fax and call handling features wherever they go

Group Dekko, headquartered north of Fort Wayne in Kendallville, Ind., is an extremely diversified group of engineering and manufacturing companies with 27 manufacturing sites on three continents. The components they design and manufacture are sold to businesses in a great range of industries, including office furniture, medical and business equipment, telecom, transportation, heating and refrigeration and consumer products.

Chris Edwards, Group Dekko¡'s CIO, was faced with an inescapable decision in 2001, when the company's lease on 30 Futjitsu PBXs was about to expire. Renewal or upgrade was not an option, as Fujitsu had decided to leave the PBX business.

Edwards was close to choosing a traditional enterprise PBX vendor when he met with Doug Sauer, CEO of Enterprise Unified Solutions. Sauer had maintained a relationship with Group Dekko since he'd first leased them their Fujitsus, during his tenure at Sprint. In the intervening years, he'd committed himself and a business to the broader potential of converged voice-and-data networking.
 
"Doug knew our company and our geographical dispersion," says Edwards. "He also knew that technologically, we were willing to stand on the front end of the implementation curve. He pitched us a Cisco Call Manger IP telephony system."

Edwards admits that he was apprehensive about putting everything on Dekko's data network, robust as it was. But, he says, "I didn't want to make a traditional PBX decision. I knew that was short-term. Doug convinced me that he had done enough installation work to make an IP solution successful."

Not just enough installation experience, but enough different kinds of installation experience would be called for, because a great range of wired and wireless technologies were needed to stretch Group Dekko's global network across all 31 sites. As important, plans called for the full gamut of convergent productivity tools.

The company now routes almost all incoming, outgoing and internal calls through its multinational network via three clustered Call Managers, located at Kendallville headquarters. A total of 1200 Cisco IP phones have now been installed in every Dekko site but Ireland, which has one IP phone.

Client realizes the benefits

Consolidating Pipes
Cisco's IP Call Manager makes a much better fit than traditional PBXs would have been. For one thing, the volume discounts realized through