L'Oréal undergoes facelift with Cisco Unified Communications

KSS senior account manager, Corne Sassenberg, says organisations like L'Oréal are seeing significant productivity improvements and impressive returns on investment with Unified Communications. "In order to realise the full benefit of their investment, organisations are increasingly looking to Unified Communication Solutions that extend beyond delivering basic Voice over IP (VoIP)."

"In order to deliver value, a Unified Communications Solution must include robust and feature-rich communications services accessible from a wide range of clients and endpoints, including enterprise telephony, unified messaging, multimedia conferencing and enterprise instant messaging (IM)," says Sassenberg.

More mobility

As the company's gateway into the African continent, L'Oréal employs in excess of 500 people in South Africa. Its manufacturing plant is responsible for the production of Softsheen-Carson hair care and toiletry products which are exported throughout Africa, Europe and the Middle East. The plant also manufactures L'Oréal Paris Elvive Shampoos and Conditioners and Garnier deodorants for the local market.

L'Oréal South Africa's corporate communication manager, Celeste Tema, says productivity applications such as Cisco's Unified Communications offers a growing number of communications and collaboration capabilities that allow users to become more mobile.

"Today, more than 85% of Fortune 500 companies use Cisco Unified Communications. Cisco Unified Communications is part of a comprehensive solution that offers a high level of security, agility, resiliency, scalability and quality of experience. With proven strength in enterprise networking, virtualisation and the data centre, Cisco can also deliver a next-generation network that supports highly secure collaboration within and across organisations," says Sassenberg.

Cisco Unified Communications Manager 8.0, the IP telephony call-processing component of the Cisco Unified Communications solution, offers a variety of benefits including reduced deployment time, quicker Return on Investment, lower ongoing operational costs and improved business continuity.

Sassenberg says Cisco's UCM helps L'Oréal become more efficient and responsive. "It creates a unified workspace that encompasses every combination of applications, devices, networks, and operating systems. It also provides a dynamic, flexible, network-based call admission control engine for voice and video and also improves cost savings and collaboration by extending Unified Communications capabilities outside the organisation."

In-house support

The Unified Communications solution has provided a platform from which to launch additional future initiatives. The Cisco IP telephony solution allows L'Oréal to bring the PBX support into the IT fold and allow for most operational support to be performed in-house.

As the Cisco solution is developed for the enterprise customer in mind, the system is built to be scalable and allows for the deployment of a centralised IP PBX cluster. Now previously separate systems or branches are combined into one single system and managed centrally.

L'Oréal can leverage the in-house Cisco skills to manage and maintain the new systems as the current security, WAN routers and wireless are Cisco. The system is software-based and runs on servers. By upgrading hardware as required the system can be scaled to thousands of phones.

"Once configured, the IP system allows users to move phones if required and by plugging into the LAN and logging into the phone the users profile follows the user. Thus this type of move can be done without external intervention or additional costs to L'Oréal," says Tema.

The IP phone shares the same cable as the user's computer and the user PC hangs off the IP phone, thus only requiring one LAN point providing L'Oréal with cost savings on cabling infrastructure.

IP contact centre

The IP contact centre is merely an add-on to the IP telephony system. By adding server platforms and software the IP telephony system has a fully functional contact centre. The entire system is designed to be remotely managed using WEB interfaces or Telnet thus allowing the administrators to be deployed centrally or to do remote support if they are not at the office.

Additionally, the Cisco LAN switches supplied will provide power to the IP phones thus not requiring separate power points and supplies. Certain end-user support functions become self-service for the users, such as creating their own speed dials, or changing their passwords.

L'Oréal achieves standardisation of equipment, support and spares where IP phones can be deployed to any branch. Users moving between branches can login to a phone and their profiles follow them such, as their own speed dials.

"Phones lists are now electronic, as users are added to the central directory; they become searchable from the IP phone. Users are able to look up missed calls, placed calls or received calls and dial from the lookup. More importantly, PA's have visibility as to whether a manager is on the phone or do a call pickup if a manager phone is ringing. All these features are soft configurable and customisable."

The proposed telephone management system allows finances to pull reports on the fly via a WEB interface or to schedule reports as required to be emailed to them. Setup access restrictions to allow department heads to only see their division's calls.

Unity connection voicemail allows users to retrieve voicemails, access remotely via a WEB interface or create personalised greetings.