Microsoft Lync Server 2102

Customer Solution Case Study

Electronics Manufacturer Saves $152,000 Annually with Unified Communications

Overview

Country or Region: United States

Industry: ManufacturingHigh tech and electronics

Customer Profile

Based in Phoenix, Arizona, Suntron is an electronics manufacturing and embedded computing solutions service provider employing approximately 1,000 people.

Business Situation

Suntron had a complex voice over IP (VoIP) solution that required expensive add-ons for unified communications. It wanted an easy-to-manage central telephony and collaboration solution.

Solution

Suntron chose a Microsoft Lync Server 2010 solution for enterprise VoIP and unified communications with instant messaging, conferencing, and presence so employees can work more efficiently.

Benefits

Reduced telephony costs

Improved redundancy and service availability

Simplified communications management

Improved customer service

We entrusted our business communications to Lync Server 2010 to offer staff flexible communications options that improve efficiencyand we will save 95 percent of our monthly telephony costs.

Tony Portela, Executive Director of IT, Suntron

Suntron provides manufacturing services to original equipment manufacturers with high reliability electronic systems and sub-systems. Employees used a Cisco voice over IP (VoIP) solution, but it was too expensive to add unified communications or web conferencing functionality. Suntron is replacing Cisco with a Microsoft Lync Server 2010 enterprise VoIP solution that works with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 to provide unified communications. Employees can collaborate in real time by using the Microsoft Lync 2010 client. Suntron expects to reduce IT resources required to manage its communications solution by 66 percent and to save 95 percent of monthly telephony costs. It virtually eliminated third-party telephone conferencing costs and reduced analog line costs by 95 percent. With more communications options, employees can keep production on schedule and serve customers more efficiently.

Situation

Suntron is a privately owned contract manufacturer supporting high-reliability mission-critical products in the aerospace, defense, medical, and high-end industrial markets. Founded in 1981 in Phoenix, Arizona, Suntron continuously improves its workforce and manufacturing processes with one common goal: to exceed the expectations of its clients. The companys manufacturing expertise lies in engineering, printed circuit board assembly, large-scale integration, complete custom system integration, and commercial off-the-shelf embedded computing solutions.

Suntron differentiates itself through a commitment to quality and service, with a focus on North American production and customer service and support, says Tony Portela, Executive Director of IT at Suntron. We have three facilities in the United States and one in Mexico, where we can take advantage of low-cost, regional manufacturing and pass those savings on to our customers.

The IT department at Suntron is, in Portelas words, a centralized, lean and mean organization, with only 20 professionals responsible for the entire operation and minimal support staff at local manufacturing facilities. The company chooses IT based on rigorous cost-benefit analyses that demonstrate employee efficiencies and hard cost savingsone reason why Suntron has standardized on Microsoft technologies.

Complex Telephone Solution

The companys Cisco voice over IP (VoIP) telecommunications solution, CallManager, deployed in 2008, was an exception to this policy. IT staff found the solution, which required three full-time employees to support, overly complex for the companys needs. As a manufacturer, Suntron operations require a fluctuating workforce to accommodate supply and demand. With the existing solution, it was taking too long to provision temporary contract workers with telephones. And the distributed nature of the CallManager environment required installations at different locations, which impacted the systems performance over the wide area network and required extra work to manage.

CallManager came with IT overhead costs that were not reflected in the products capabilities, says Portela. Because of its complexity, we had to manage separate CallManager systems. Two of the three employees supporting the solution were senior systems engineers who had to perform phone provisioning every day. This was not an effective use of their time.

Another problem was that the Cisco telecommunications solution forced Suntron to purchase new components when it wanted additional functionality. The Cisco voice mail system, called Unity, is not naturally integrated with the CallManager solution, and the products require two sets of user credentials and management tools.

We already had a third-party teleconferencing solution called ReadyConference. We wanted to add web conferencing, but it would have been yet another tool to manage, and we are striving for efficiency, single-pane-of-glass management, and ease of use within the IT department, says Portela. We wanted to build a redundant architecture, but it was cost-prohibitive. We wanted Response Groups functionality, called Intelligent Voice Response, but it started at costs well beyond our IT budget. In the Cisco world, everywhere we turned, we were looking at spending more money and doing more work.

Seamless Communications Vital

Suntron required a unified, scalable, and cost-effective communications solution that would meet its business needs. The company works with long lead times to order materials, and it requires reliable, efficient global communications to minimize its inventory of complex components. Effective communications are essential on the manufacturing floor where mid-assembly change orders must be relayed immediately to the production line to minimize losses. Engineers at different facilities need easy-to-use, reliable communications to troubleshoot production issues, minimize downtime, maintain production schedules, and collaborate on new specifications.

For a manufacturer, seamless communications are vitalwe deal with suppliers, partners, and value-added resellers all over the world who are working to ensure timely delivery for our customers, says Portela. Executives, corporate support staff, factory workers, engineers, the sales team: we wanted to provide everyone with a full range of communication options that would integrate with their work stylesin the office, on the road, or on the factory floorwithout spending a lot of time and money. Given the importance of seamless, reliable communications, we wanted to get it right. Our goal was to replace Cisco with a single unified communications solution.

Suntron took a step toward this goal in 2009 when it deployed Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 to replace its ReadyConference teleconferencing solution. Within two months, the company had retired ReadyConference, saving approximately $15,000 a year in internal conference calls. With Office Communications Server 2007, executives and knowledge workers used presence, instant messaging (IM) and PC-to-PC calls to streamline internal communications and reduce cell phone costs.

Office Communications Server 2007 required little training both for IT staff and users, and we saved money by bringing audio conferencing in-house, but there were some gaps in traditional telephony features so we werent able to replace CallManager, says Portela. However, all that changed when we heard about the next iteration of the enterprise communications solution from Microsoft.

Solution

It was in 2010 that Portela learned about Microsoft Lync Server 2010, which offers the complete telephony capabilities of an IP private branch exchange (PBX) solution while consolidating the different ways people communicateenterprise voice, IM, and audio and video web conferencinginto a single client interface, Microsoft Lync 2010. Lync Server 2010 is a perfect fit for modern manufacturers like Suntron that require communication solutions to sustain their fast-paced business workflows and improve productivity: whether the communications are part of structured business process workflows or ad hoc informal collaborations that support daily operations. Portela recognized that the built-in interoperability within the Lync Server 2010 tool set, and the fact that it interoperates with the Microsoft Office desktop suite, would help staff work better together across the organization to seize business opportunities and improve production.

The solution interoperates with the Microsoft software and technologies that Suntron already owned, extending the value of its IT investments: Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 for unified communications; Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for workflows that include click-to-call capabilities; and Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, which includes the Lync 2010 client for presence throughout desktop applications. Lync Server 2010 has all the features we needed integrated into one product, with one management infrastructure, says Portela. We were excited about gaining a complete telephony solution that was also a productivity tool, enabling staff to work efficiently anywhere.

Highly Available Telephony Architecture

Within a few months, IT staff at Suntron had devised a migration plan from Cisco CallManager to Lync Server 2010. Suntron deployed the Microsoft communications solution in a virtualized environment to reduce hardware costs and simplify IT management. Because it licensed the Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise operating system, the company already had a virtualization solutionthe Hyper-V virtualization technology that is built into it.

We brought in session initiation protocol [SIP] trunks to replace our traditional, primary rate interface [PRI] phone lines. We replaced our dispersed Unity voicemail and voice attendant servers with the enterprise messaging functionality that we had in our centrally managed Exchange Server 2010 environment. And we created a highly available architecture so that we could lose an entire data center and not drop a single phone call, says Portela. Outside phone calls come in over multiprotocol label switching [MPLS] so that no matter where you are in the network, the phone line is always connected to a server.

To create excitement for the new communications solution, Suntron launched an internal marketing campaign. IT staff trained power users in each department and asked them to evangelize the tool to others. The requests started flowing in, says Portela. People were most excited about the integration of voice messages in Outlook, the ability to click to dial, presence integrated into Word documents, on-the-fly conference calls, and sharing documents during IM sessions.

Rapid Rollout

IT staff deployed the solution on a per-employee basis, when requested. It took only 10 minutes per employee for a desktop support staff member to deploy the Lync client software and offer a basic overview of its capabilities. Today, employees are adding their photos to the Lync 2010 client and using the Activity Feed to report where they are and what they are doing. Now, employees can search for colleagues by their skill sets, which are published on their SharePoint Server 2010 My Site profiles.

Members of the IT staff are using Response Groups in Lync Server 2010 to intelligently route calls to the help desk, and they have begun to incorporate presence and click-to-call capabilities into SharePoint-based business workflowsfor example, to assist sales representatives with completing their quotes. In conjunction with its Lync Server 2010 deployment, Suntron is also using the Unified Messaging auto attendant in Exchange Server 2010 to introduce a central auto attendant for the entire corporation. The Unified Messaging auto attendant transfers callers to the extension of an employee or department without the intervention of a receptionist. And for the first time, the company can establish federated communications with many of its suppliers and customers who are also using Lync Server 2010.

New Opportunities for Communication

On the factory floor, Suntron is using Lync Server 2010 to deliver completely new opportunities for communications in environments where it is too loud to hear telephones. In December 2011, the company bought 10 wireless Acer tablets running the Windows 7 operating system. It also purchased highly specialized, digital, high-resolution webcams with USB connectors that can be plugged into the tablet. Engineers can point the webcam directly at a circuit board and play the video through the Lync 2010 client to share with colleagues in other facilities for troubleshooting issues, says Portela. Now that Lync Server 2010 offers so many communication options in addition to voice, we are seeing opportunities for real-time collaboration that we never had before.

To date, Suntron has transferred approximately 350 employees to its Microsoft communications solution. The next step will be deploying the solution for the employees at the Mexico facility, and the company expects that the global rollout to 700 employees will be complete by mid-2012.

Benefits

Suntron is already experiencing significant benefits from choosing a Microsoft communications solution that is more cost-effective and easier to manage than the Cisco solution. Employees are readily adding unified communications into their everyday work lives and are working more efficiently. In addition, the IT staff designed a more available architecture to reduce the worry of service outage.

We entrusted our business communications to Lync Server 2010 to offer staff flexible communications options that improve efficiencyand we will save 95 percent of our monthly telephony costs, says Portela. With better global communications to streamline production and ensure on-time delivery, we can build on our reputation for great customer service.

Reduced Annual Telephony Costs by $120,000

When Suntron finishes the migration to Lync Server 2010, it will reduce monthly recurring expenditures on communications by 95 percent, which equates to more than $120,000 annually. The bulk of this savings comes from replacing PRI lines, which only support 23 concurrent phone calls, with a platform that supports more efficient SIP trunking. For the facility in Mexico alone, this move will save $10,000 a month. In addition, Suntron will save $20,000 annually in software and hardware maintenance support costs and an estimated $12,000 annually in site-to-site communications and IP-based calls with federated partners.

We have established federation with customers, suppliers, and almost every VAR [value-added reseller] that we deal with, says Portela. This will save us a huge amount of money in international phone calls. We used to pay for calls with customers by setting up a toll-free number in their country and redirecting the calls to our phone lines, but with Lync Server 2010 federation and IP-based calling, those costs will be significantly reduced.

Savings also comes in the form of labor costs. Because the Microsoft communications solution offers a single set of management tools, two of the three IT staff members who once supported the Cisco solution are now able to work on more strategic projects, and Suntron gets the value of their expertise. When we switched from Cisco to Lync Server 2010, we no longer needed high-level engineers to manage our phone system, says Portela. Thats a 66 percent reduction in IT labor costs to support our communications.

Previously, receptionists at each site received one call every 30 seconds, and they were busy all day answering phones. Since deploying the centralized Unified Messaging auto attendant, Suntron has reduced incoming calls to one an hour. The auto attendant gives callers the options of being attended in English or Spanish, and they can either speak or type in the recipients name or be directed to different departments, says Portela. We have given our receptionists more valuable work to do during downtime periods.

Improved Redundancy and Service Availability

However, according to Portela, the number one benefit of the Microsoft communications solution is availability. When his team designed the Lync Server 2010 environment, introducing redundancy was its first priority. We decided to spread our front-end servers out because we love availability, he says. We cant afford downtime that interrupts our production schedule, but with this solution, at any given time, we could lose an entire data center and it would not affect our business communications. Thats invaluable to us. If I were to build this configuration in the CallManager environment, it would have cost twice as much.

Simplified Communications Management

Instead of managing its Cisco environment of distributed modules, with Lync Server 2010, Suntron IT staff has a user-friendly unified management environment in the web-based Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Control Panel. As a result, the IT department can provide services to employees more quickly: now it only takes a few clicks to provision new workers with telephony tools and equipment.

Because staff is already familiar with Microsoft products, the solution was easy-to-learn, says Portela. The Lync Server management interface is simple and intuitive. Even better, we can proactively delegate tasks and management to help-desk staff, or to on-site managers who support their local users, rather than waiting for our senior engineers just to make a change to an extension.

Improved Customer Service

Suntron is integrating presence and click-to-call capabilities into the quote process to boost its responsiveness and stand out from its competitors in an industry where customers often have to wait a long time for quotes. When sales representatives receive a lead, they use presence as part of a SharePoint-based workflow to escalate the opportunity to the next available project manager.

We want to be as agile as we can in responding to a sales opportunity, and so when we can quickly locate a project manager to assist a customer with a quote, its a powerful way to differentiate our service, says Portela. It makes us look more reactive and effective with communications.

Suntron is also using its communications solution from Microsoft to help customers save money. Recently, the company decided to move a customers production line from its Houston facility to Mexico, where it can produce certain components less expensively. Before we had the Lync client installed on our tablet PCs to relay video from our webcams, this move would have required about six months of traveling back and forth, teaching people, drawing up floor layouts, designing engineering processes, transferring supply chainall done in person. Today we are doing most of this via videoconferencing enabled with Lync, saving the customer months of ramp-up time.

Engineers are using the same tablet PCs and webcams to collaborate with colleagues all over the US and Mexico and troubleshoot issues on the factory floor, which helps reduce downtime and maintain customers expected delivery dates.

Lync Server 2010 aligns with our corporate strategy to lower operational costs, increase efficiency, lead the marketplace in innovation, and foster growth through increased employee productivity, concludes Portela.

Microsoft Lync Server 2010

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:

www.microsoft.com

For more information about Suntron products and services, call (855) 786-8766 or visit the website at: www.suntroncorp.com

Microsoft Lync Server 2010 ushers in a new connected user experience that transforms

every communication into an interaction that is more collaborative and engaging and that is accessible from anywhere. For IT, the benefits are equally powerful, with a highly secure and reliable communications solution that works with existing tools and systems for easier management, lower cost of ownership, smoother deployment and migration, and greater choice and flexibility.

For more information about Microsoft Lync Server 2010, go to:

www.microsoft.com/lync