Europa Boosts £1.7m IT Investment with New Telecoms Solution
Europa Worldwide Logistics, one of the UK’s leading privately owned transport companies, is investing £100,000 in a national rollout of a new NEC communications solution across its UK sites. The project, expected to be complete by May 2015, will enable telephony to be integrated with the company’s new bespoke IT system known as Leonardo, further enhancing the major £1.7m IT investment announced earlier this year.
Leonardo is being designed, developed and implemented by Europa’s 19 strong, in-house IT team and once completed will offer a fully integrated, end-to-end management system, working across Europa’s entire organisation and providing a fully harmonised system across the branches and partner network. The first phase is a two year programme which will be completed by January 2016 focusing on Europa’s road freight operations.
The new telecoms solution – the NEC SV9100 IP communications system and MyCalls Call Management application – will be delivered by NEC communications specialists, EBT Maintenance, and will provide a consistent platform across all 11 Europa UK sites.
Utilising a newly installed wide area network all localised equipment will be replaced by two centralised solutions at Europa’s Birmingham hub and Northampton logistics centre. The IP PBX solution has the capacity to serve both IP and digital telephone devices across multiple sites including SIP capability.
Richard Litchfield, IT Director at Europa, said: “Leonardo is a huge investment that will help future proof the business and now we are going one step further with the introduction of our new communications system. Having localised equipment across 11 sites means that if a failure occurs at any one site, we physically need an engineer to attend site and resolve the issue; in the meantime we may have a loss of service. By having a totally resilient centralised solution across two sites, we can avoid any such down time.”
The new telecoms solution will benefit customers, partners and the company’s internal workforce and the opportunity to integrate telephony with Leonardo will create a number of advantages, such as enabling incoming client phone calls to trigger customer records to open from the company database and allowing employees to make outgoing calls directly from the database itself.
The system will increase mobility; enabling Europa employees to ‘hot-desk’ to other branches and have their calls move with them and have mobile phones integrated as extensions on the system. Delays in retrieving customer messages will be reduced and the ability to expand SIP telephone lines will result in increased flexibility and cost control. All telephony activity with real-time reports (calls waiting, calls missed, time to answer etc) will be visible and managers can also be provided with emailed reports analysing individual and branch performance, on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
“The solution will bring together all users across our sites, creating one virtual office. Furthermore it will have significant business benefits for Europa, including a central online portal to review telecoms billing for the whole group and around 50% savings on ongoing telephony costs,” added Europa’s Richard Litchfield.
“Integrated telephony within Leonardo was always a fundamental requirement and will form part of the core operational and sales processes. I am delighted to be working with both EBT and NEC again; both are extremely capable companies and between us I am confident we will create a real fit-for-purpose solution.”
Steve Hogan, Managing Director of EBT Maintenance, said: “We have a history of working with Richard and we’re thrilled he’s chosen to work with us again on such an important project. The new system we’re implementing is scalable, which is ideal for Europa as it expands, allowing easy deployment of extra users and providing a single group internal telephone directory, improving staff communication.”
Europa has a team of 500 working across 11 regional branches, 60,000 sq mt of warehousing, hubs in Birmingham and Erith near Dartford and operates 100 trucks and 200 of its own trailers. The new communications system will also be installed in to Europa’s new state-of-the-art 262,500 sq ft (24,387 sq mt) Dartford facility, set to open in May next year.
Andrew Cooper, Sales Director at NEC comments, “EBT have a long and successful history as specialised NEC Business Partners. They have a strong team of accredited engineers who are directly employed, not outsourced, enabling them to deliver bespoke, UK-wide installations such as this latest Europa Worldwide Logistics.”
About Europa
Europa Worldwide Logistics is one of the largest privately owned Transport and Logistics companies in the United Kingdom. Offering air, ocean and logistics services, plus an unrivalled land service to the whole of Europe, the company has a strong presence in 100 countries across six continents. In the UK, Europa employs 500 people over 11 branches. In 2012 it had a turnover of £73m, carrying some 500,000 consignments for a growing number of blue chip companies.
About EBT
EBT was established in 1999 and serves SMEs from five to 500 users UK wide. EBT has 15 years’ experience providing specialist services on the NEC telecoms system platforms and offers a range of telecoms services and solutions – including telecoms billing services, systems, mobile and data communications. A white-label engineering service is also available, providing specialist expertise to other NEC resellers in the UK.
About NEC
NEC Enterprise Solutions provides IT & Communication solutions to small, medium and large enterprises in both the private and public sectors. Designed for open connectivity, high availability and flexible growth, our innovative solutions incorporate the latest voice, data and video technologies and enable real-time, collaborative working, increased productivity and customer satisfaction. Our servers, storage solutions, software and virtualised workstations enable businesses to maximise operational efficiency, performance and profitability. NEC Enterprise Solutions serves its customers across EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa) through a network of direct sales organizations, business partners and value-added resellers.
