The suite of advanced collaboration services, the myriad of new soft clients and smart phones, plus the new SIP standards that allow more efficient interworking and call trunking, all provide the opportunity for improved business productivity. The advantages are never more pronounced than with larger organizations, where better communications and faster decision-making can ensure a competitive advantage.
Management tools clearly lower the total cost of ownership for these enterprise communications platforms.
In the case of VOSS solutions however, the benefits go significantly further than just financial. The VOSS capabilities enhance organizational productivity in their own right, across a number of additional areas:
Retained knowledge within the organization
Organizational knowledge retention is one of the most difficult things for large organizations to master. Knowledge can be retained efficiently in people’s heads for smaller companies, but this human approach has never been successful for larger companies.
Large companies need systems in order to retain organizational knowledge. The success of salesforce.com has proven the advantages of a central data repository that becomes self-sustaining through organizational disciplines.
Original designs, field implementation changes, subsequent operational changes are all captured automatically within the central VOSS management system and are available in real-time to any authorized user.
VOSS Solutions is the only fulfillment management system that provides a central knowledge retention system for advanced communications systems, with built-in organizational discipline. Without VOSS, the design and implementation knowledge resides either in the heads of key individuals, or is documented on excel spreadsheets; both of which are not sustainable in the long term.
Design implemented correctly
Large scale communications systems are rarely implemented as per the original design documentation. Human nature dictates that engineers will never follow instructions to the letter, when configuring a complex communications system. Either though error, or through personal preference, slight changes are introduced into the final platform configuration.
These changes will often have zero impact to 99% of the call flows and application interworking, but inevitably, at some point a system change is made that causes a particular call flow or application to fail. In most instances, it is incredibly difficult to troubleshoot these types of issues and hence speciality tools have been developed to compare an element configuration to that of the original design and report on any differences.
With VOSS, the original design is implemented correctly each and every time, because engineers play no part in the detailed configuration process. Most other management systems still require engineers to configure the more complex technical areas, such as dial plan. Only with VOSS is the detailed dial plan configuration fully automated.
With VOSS, the need for additional test tools and configuration comparison tools are greatly reduced.
Faster triage times
When trouble tickets do eventuate, engineers will often take 20 to 30 minutes just to orient themselves with the correct infrastructure and services associated with the relevant ticket. Then they are often required to spend tens of minutes digging through lists of configuration pages on each infrastructure element, trying to find the relevant data fields.
With advanced UC&C infrastructures, the number of infrastructure elements that service a single user location is growing – it is not uncommon to have 6 or 7 separate network elements to investigate (IP-PBX, messaging server, presence server, mobility server, collaboration server, session boarder controller, local gateway, DHCP server, etc).
VOSS enables orientation times to be significantly reduced because a trouble ticket can be rapidly linked to service infrastructure as this information is fully mapped and can be accessed centrally without having to refer to the underlying network. Similarly, detailed service configuration can be checked centrally as well, meaning that there is no need to search through long lists of configuration on a network element.
Only VOSS provides this central repository of data to allow faster triage times for trouble tickets.
Frees engineers from mundane, repetitive admin tasks
One of the less obvious productivity barriers for most organizations is the fact that highly skilled engineers are required to perform incredibly boring and repetitive administration tasks. This leads to high levels of staff turnover. As the number of services increase with collaboration, so the repetitive workload increases exponentially.
The reason that engineers must perform these tasks is not because they are complex; many are very simple. It is purely because it would be too risky to allow open access to the underlying configuration, where great damage could be done (e.g. turning off the CEO’s phone).
With the introduction of fulfillment management tools such as VOSS, the risk of damaging the underlying configuration is removed. An office administrator, with minimal training, can easily be restricted to managing only a sub-set of services, features or users.
This frees engineers to work on more strategic initiatives, which in turn improves their job satisfaction and improves staff retention rates. High staff turnover is one of the most costly events to an organization’s productivity levels.
Improved features
With the growing complexity of advanced features such as multiple devices per user (desk, soft and mobile clients), fixed-mobile-convergence and integrated mobile clients on smart phones, it has become clear that a number of advanced feature capabilities can be provided, but only with advanced, automated, management tools.
Take one example – the ability to perform advanced A and B number analysis and number translation to deliver a common single number reach number presentation, irrespective of the device that is making the call. With SNR, it is critical to present the SNR number when making a call. But for most communications platforms, the device number is presented and not the SNR number.
There is a highly complex set of dynamic configuration required to deliver the capability in this example. It is not a one-time setting and it requires multiple network elements to be configured each time a change is made. For a large scale organization, with many mobile workers, it is inconceivable to think that this configuration could be done manually by engineers.
This is just one example of where an advanced management system such as VOSS Solutions can actually enhance the collaboration services capabilities and therefore improve the baseline productivity of the organization.
Avoid data slippage
Confidence in the quality of the underlying data within enterprise communications systems is critical to organizations. Data slippage is one of the worst situations an organization can find itself, as correcting inaccurate data in the communications infrastructure can be incredibly time consuming and expensive.
VOSS Solutions imposes a high level of discipline across the communications platform and significantly lowers the risk of data slippage.
Improved integration with legacy systems
For large organizations, their communications system is typically made up by a number of separate infrastructure elements. If an organization wishes to integrate their communications system to their business applications, such as CRM or Peoplesoft systems, then they will need to create multiple integration points to each infrastructure element and each interface will be a custom development with a high maintenance cost. This is practically unworkable.
VOSS Solutions provides a single point of integration for the organizations business applications, as well as providing standard APIs that are supported through future releases of both VOSS and the underlying infrastructure. This ensures a much more elegant integration and one where maintenance costs are low.
