BBW: away from the island

"If XPhone is briefly unavailable due to maintenance, there is an immediate outcry."

The project

Island solutions are a horror to any infrastructure manager. The Bavarian Business Training Institute (Bildungswerk der Bayerischen Wirtschaft or bbw for short) has left the island behind: more than 300 locations with hundreds of PBXs have been merged into a single infrastructure. With the help of XPhone Connect, at the same time communication between the locations has been significantly simplified.

"Our work is extremely organisationally intensive," reports Thomas Tappe, Deputy Head of IT at bbw subsidiary FAW. "Good interaction both between employees and between locations is therefore of great importance to us."

Today, staff save a lot of time on every call. All contacts are available in the client via a free text search. A call can be launched with a click of the mouse. A conference call can be scheduled just as easily:

"Via an Outlook add-in, our staff can create conference calls with a single click in Outlook and manage them like appointments," says Herbert Olbort, Head of Data Processing at the bbw Group. "As soon as the meeting starts, a pop-up appears where participants can dial in completely without a PIN."

Employees who travel a lot benefit from the mobile app: "Our staff are often active at multiple locations," explains Olbort. "If they get stuck in traffic on the A9 once again, they can redirect their calls via the app directly to their mobile or else activate voicemail."

Conclusion

"The feedback from our staff is consistently positive," concludes Tappe. He personally has not touched his phone since the XPhone was introduced, he says. "Meanwhile I can hardly imagine a greater waste of time than typing in a number."

"To start with our employees were quite sceptical: after all, you can also make phone calls by hand, they said." "Now if XPhone is briefly unavailable due to maintenance, there is an immediate outcry."

Thomas Tappe
Deputy Head of IT
FAW