Lupus Association Australia

UC Solution Design & Implementation

The Lupus Association is a community based counselling and advocacy service with over 1100 members throughout Australia. Lupus Association is a non-government, not-for-profit, self-help organisation. Lupus Association provides an information and counselling support service for those who have recently been diagnosed as well as those who have been living with lupus for some time.

Bern Storey, VP of Information Systems and Technology for Lupus Association Australia, has a team of three full-time IT employees supporting 150 users scattered across the nation. With so much ground to cover, he turned to our team of experts at GROWIFY for their in-depth knowledge about unified communications.

“I didn’t know all the details of every system—nor was I able to learn all the details,” said Storey.

“But I knew we wanted features such as hot desking, voicemail with the twin to a mobile phone where voicemail messages could be patched to a mobile phone or in a WAV file, and I knew that we wanted fax on the same numbers.”

GROWIFY worked with Lupus Association Australia to find a solution that had all of the features required to increase efficiency and reduce demand on the IT department. Assessing the company’s current and future needs, GROWIFY engineers worked with vendors to design a UC solution that incorporated all of Lupus Association requirements

Execution:

After finding the right solution, one of the biggest challenges GROWIFY faced was implementing the new project in time for a busy summer season. With 80% of the company’s business scheduled between December and February, every IT project must be planned, deployed, and tested before the summer rush begins.

“GROWIFY was very sensitive of our timeframe,” said Storey.

“All of the new phones actually were shipped straight to the location where IT individuals unwrapped them and put them on the desk.”

By splitting up the install, GROWIFY was able to get a head start on cabling, setting up the new phones in place next to the old ones, and configuring the UC system for each location.

“I’ve done a bunch of phone system rollovers in my career, and the one that we did with GROWIFY is the only one that we did in the middle of the day. Everything ran so smoothly. When the integrator came out and we hooked up the system and all the phones were live on every desk that we intended to cut over at 5:00 pm on, say, Wednesday, and here it was, 12 noon on Tuesday and the whole system was running. We were just amazed at the speed by which we were able to get this other system working in parallel.” said Storey.

Results:

With the proper unified communications solution in place, GROWIFY had the latest features, the scalability to ramp up for busy season, and a system that provided the reliability and performance his users demanded.

“I was very satisfied because we had the features we wanted such as hot desking, where when we created a new user in the system, they could sit at any desk in the entire company, dial in a code, and that phone became their phone. It really cut down the amount of time spent in IT for provisioning phones. Another benefit of UC was the increased communication between different branches. Also, with the Voice over IP linking all of our offices together, it really decreased the amount of time that it took to find somebody in another office. Having cordless phones on individuals in the warehouses increased efficiency as well. In the past, we would have been ringing a phone sitting on their desk when that person was on a forklift or working out in the warehouse. It really kind of made the company smaller, even though we had locations nationwide.”