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>>Steve Roberts: My name's Steve Roberts, I'm the Finance Director
and IT Director of White Brothers Unlimited, a stainless steel fabrication business in
Newcastle, Newcastle Upon Tyne. We've been established for a long time. We started in
1884 in the West End of Newcastle working for the farming industry as an engineering
business and over the years have developed in various ways but eventually into stainless
steel fabrications. So, today we use stainless steel fabrications for mainly food and pharmaceuticals
companies that need hygiene grade stainless steel plant for their factories. We also do
site service work. And really what we pride ourselves in is the quality of our manufacture
and the skill of our people.
We have people here who've been here for 20 to 30 years, so we've developed an awful lot
of skill in the people we have here. So we've established the quality and experience over
the years to be able to manufacture very high quality fabrications for many high integrity
industries such as food, pharmaceutical, nuclear, biotech, oil and gas.
And we have an existing PBX in place which we've had for about 20 years, but it was becoming
rather unreliable. We have a problem with the UPS, which meant that whenever we had
a power cut our system would take a while to come back up. We never quite knew why.
And obviously that brought in the fear that maybe there was a problem with it.
Maybe it wouldn't come back up sometime. And so we realized that we had to start looking
for a replacement. We also have problems finding replacement handsets when we're having problem
with our handsets. It was difficult to source a new one, particularly the reception handsets
which are obviously particularly important.
And I guess our lacked to this is the realization that our telephone system is absolutely mission
critical. So it really needed to work and couldn't be fluffing around trying to source
your ancient handsets that were not manufactured anymore. So, I was also well aware of the
convergence that was going on in, you know, between IT and Telephony and I'm also self
confessed Linux geek.
I have a lot of Linux servers here. I was very confident in open-source server software
and open-source infrastructure software, so I was aware of Asterisk could do that. I was
aware that it was really a reliable system and a very flexible system. My first thought
was that I could do it myself, maybe I could just set a server up and install Asterisk.
But when I started to have a look into it, I realized that it was just too specialist
an area, really and it was just too much of a risk to do it myself and I needed some experts
to come in and really do this for me. Set it up, get it working, make sure it works
properly, make sure how the support contract in place, so that if anything went wrong,
you know, I'd have a point of calling that people to get it sorted.
So I searched the internet and I found a few different companies. I got in touch with a
few of them and gotten in touch with the Foehn's as part of that process. And I was very impressed
with the knowledge they had of Asterisk, the knowledge they had of open-source software
and just the sort of technical expertise that they provided.
Really just seem to be an exact match for what I was looking for. Really, in some ways
a vanilla Asterisk system but maintained, and modified, and customized, to suit our
requirements by and to affirm that we'll knew who to use the software and knew how it worked.
In the process of finding a supplier for our new phone system, I found a few different
companies that could supply an Asterisk solution.
But most of them seemed to be supplying really a rather prepackaged solution often with the
hardware included. You get the hardware device with new version of Asterisk stored on it.
But that made me a little bit concerned, that the companies wouldn't have the depth of experience
and knowledge of configuring and implementing the Asterisk software itself.
So that if we had a problem with it they'd be able to fix it. So I guess the difference
with Foehn's was that it was quite clear that they were a company that knew Asterisk well,
you know, a company that knew how to implement open-source software such as Asterisk. And
so any problems that will entire, I was convinced that they would have the technical knowledge
and depth of experience, in order to be able to configure it properly, modify it, make
it do exactly what we want it to do and make it work.
Support was very important for us as well. Although I have quite a lot of experience
myself and we have experience in [xx] managing Linux service and open-source software, we
are in need of the support for Asterisk so that it was, I was confident that we could
keep it running and that any problems we had will be fixed. And so I was quite happy that
Foehn could provide me with a support contract and that they have the staff on site at Foehn
to be able to answer the problems we had and they can also log in remotely as well. I can
see that they can log in remotely to our server and make configuration changes remotely as
well.
So that give me the confidence that we can make the system work. White Bros has been
around for a long time, and has developed a lot over the years and we're continuing
to develop now. We've recently helped found a new start-up company which is manufacturing
or developing a machine to manufacture food, basically food processing machine which is
very revolutionary.
And that's required us to build collaborations with companies in the U.S. and in Australia,
and across Europe as well. So we've had a requirement really to be able to conference
call abroad. We have speaker phones on the new phones that we have which really enable
us to get group people together, stand them in a room put them on a speakerphone, call
to Australia. You know, it's a room full of people across then and how that work, you
know, use it with call rates which are very affordable, so that's very simple for us to
do now and that would've been completely impossible before we brought the new system in. I think
as well, just the quality of the calls and the quality phones encourages the staff to
speak to our customers more.
It encourages them to speak to our customers and suppliers. I think that's a very good
thing for our business. And just generally we have to be very contactable by our customers
[xx] service customers and you just be able to get in touch with us very quickly, because
I have very urgent problems on site. So, for instance, if I'm not here and somebody leaves
a message on my voice mail it will just get e-mailed to me so wherever I go, I'll pick
the voice mail up from my phone as an email attachment, and that means, you know, I can
stay in contact even though I'm not here so altogether it's been a huge step forward for
us, really.
I think it's a much more functional system than we have before, and it's really helped
us to bring us to the 21st century, really. I think too many times, we're really still
a very old fashioned company, we've been round a long time and we really trying to modernize
ourselves and this is really been a step forward.