Telstra IP delivers bandwidth benefits

Mailing Solutions Company takes turbo charged delivery of productivity savings.

Business Challenge

Slow and unreliable internet access can be a major barrier to the smooth running of any business. But when your company is experiencing a major growth spurt the problem can be exacerbated many times over.

Customer data, complex spreadsheets and other bandwidth- hungry traffic can be generated in huge volumes by teams of sales and technical staff, while backing up important data is no small task either.

Just over two and a half years ago this was the challenge of GBC Australia faced as it became one of Australia’s leading providers of equipment, supplies and services for document finishing and mailing processing.

GBC Australia is a subsidiary of ACCO Brands Corporation. GBC Australia’s head office is located in Regents Park, Sydney, with branches in Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra along with GBC authorised dealerships in South Australia, Western Australia, Northern Territory and Tasmania. GBC Australia employs over 200 staff across Australia, including over 70 field sales representatives and over 40 service technician.

“Bandwidth was becoming a major business issue for us and hampered productivity. We had been using a Frame Relay solution for four years but as our business was growing at such a rate that the network was finding it hard to handle the internet traffic,” according to GBC IT Manager Ron Ho.

“Our staff kept saying the system was too slow. The heavy email traffic on the network would impact the whole business because business critical applications like our Enterprise Resource Planning would also be slowed significantly.”

Solution

Working with Telstra, GBC migrated away from the older Frame Relay technology to an IP Wide Area Network Solution (IP WAN) that could meet its immediate business objectives and evolved with future business needs.

IP WAN provides organizations with a simple, cost-effective and secure means of interconnecting between metropolitan, regional and rural offices – virtually anywhere in the country.

Telstra IP WAN allows GBC to use a single data connection in each location and then rely on the built-in intelligence and security of the Telstra IP network to manage the routing and delivery of valuable data between locations, almost anywhere across the nation.

Mr Ho said IP-based networking proved to be the ideal communications foundation for GBC to improve business productivity.

“The older technology was very expensive to upgrade so it was easier for us to move to an IP platform that was cheaper and very suitable for our business needs, Mr Ho said.

The total cost of the new IP solution was more competitive than simply upgrading the old technology and when a problem occurred with the network it was much easier to fix.”

The Telstra IP network now connects all of GBC’s business location to their head office through a combination of 512kbps and 250kbps high speed links. Telstra manages GBC’s network and email servers from a secure, central location, helping to increase network reliability. GBC has just one number to call for any service request while network advanced monitoring and reporting tools ensure business disruptions are kept at an absolute minimum and costs are properly managed.

Business benefits

By improving the stability of their communications network, GBC can provide their staff more reliable broadband internet access. The sales force can now access CRM tools and information via GBC’s Wide Area Network. And the network can evolve to support new applications that enable automated businesses processes, including e-commerce, Voice over IP, converged solutions, shared intranets and extranets as GBC’s business needs change.

Mr Ho said that one of the major benefits of moving to Telstra IP was the ability to deploy traditional desk-bound business applications to sales and technical staff in the field.

“The ability to integrate wireless into the IP network has helped us address one of our major business problems around late invoicing.

We’ve now created a virtual office for 40 of our field technicians so they can download their new jobs and generate invoices though their PDAs.

The old system meant we had to fill out paper based forms which often lead to long delays in invoicing.

Now all invoices can be done the same day and the productivity of our field staff is improved enormously because they can respond to customer’s jobs faster than before.

Mr Ho said the switch to an IP-based network now allowed GBC to keep pace with its plans for business improvements and growth.

The move to IP was an absolute business necessity but we needed a technology partner like Telstra that not only understood IP but also how it related to our specific business needs.

Since we implemented IP two years ago we’ve seen much less user complaints and less problems with the network so we can now establish a path that puts the IP network in the centre of our future plans for business growth.