Case Study: City of Lakewood, Colorado
Colorado’s fourth largest city engages OCx to install and support ShoreTel IP-PBx and a data network.
Customer Type: City Government
Overview: City of 150,000 residents, departments include police, public works, water utilities, recreational activities, cultural events and family assistance programs.
Background:
Local governments face constant challenges in fulfilling service delivery requirements while remaining good stewards of taxpayer dollars. The City of Lakewood, Colorado, is a good example of success in both categories.
The City receives thousands of phone calls daily. Calls destined to recreation centers, public works, police department, inspectors and code enforcers, cultural events or family assistance departments need to reach their destination reliably. In the cases of police and fire, data delivery, toll quality voice and intelligent handling of calls is mission critical. for this reason, when Boris Naschansky, the City of Lakewood’s CIO, decided to upgrade their network and voice infrastructures, and he chose OCx as the company to partner with..
The Challenge:
The city needed to Replace an aging phone system with a reliable, cost-effective and easy to manage system. The City’s 22-year-old phone system and underlying data network became increasingly costly and time-consuming to maintain. It offered limited or basic features for the 1,200 full-time and part-time employees located at over two dozen offices across the city.
The city also wanted to Improve the success rate for citizens reaching the right staff member: “We want to ensure that every call into the City’s offices reaches the right person as quickly as possible,” Mr Naschansky explained. “But on the old system incoming calls rang three times at one desk, three times at the next, and so on, finally ringing in the director’s office, by which time if the party was still on the line, they were frustrated. Getting stuck in the cycle of returning calls and leaving voicemails back and forth was just not productive.”
Finally, the city sought to Consolidate communications between city hall, multiple facilities, and field personnel. It was not possible, for example, to add more remote offices to the phone system affordably, so staff were isolated and underserved. Even worse, the existing voicemail system was failing, requiring the IT staff to send broadcasts to alert City Staff that messages might be lost, "due to overnight maintenance." “Our IT help desk and engineering teams were constantly on pins and needles running fire drills, and frequently calling out contractors to do simple phone moves and changes,” said Wendy Shrader, manager of network services.
The Vendor and Technology Selection Process:
Select a trustworthy integration partner and choose a technology platform that would achieve the city’s goals: The evaluation process was meticulous. Mr Naschansky and his team consulted with their previous partner supporting their Siemens system. They also received presentations from local Cisco, Nortel and Avaya VARs.
In the end, references played a key role in their decision. “We were looking for a partner that was experienced in VoIP, and not just traditional PBX or hybrid phone systems. We wanted a partner that understood the local government setting. After meeting OCx and seeing a ShoreTel demonstration at an industry event, the decision makers decided to visit three ShoreTel government installations that were implemented by the company. “We all felt they stood out in both of these areas.” explained Ms Shrader, who led the evaluation team. Shawn Cullingford, Lakewood’s telecommunications engineer added: “OCx, set up a pilot ShoreTel system in half a day, and started training that afternoon with some of the staff. The other vendor needed weeks to set up that kind of pilot, and expected to set up a demo within a week. As for the PBx platform, the ShoreTel system was simple to use, and we all found the user interface extremely intuitive. In addition, unlike some of the other vendors, ShoreTel is not three different operating systems on separate servers. We certainly did not want to add that level of complexity to our network.”
Solution Deployment:
OCx deployed the ShoreTel UC system across the city’s offices, based on four ShoreGear T1K voice switches, eight ShoreGear 220 T1 switches, and four ShoreGear 24A switches. More than 1,000 ShorePhone IP Telephones were deployed throughout the environment, standardizing on the IP-265 model for ease of support.
Training was conducted by OCx as a train-the-trainer program, and rolled out to employees over two months. “During the initial implementation phase, OCx provided useful training outlines and even programmed a button on my phone so I could reach Shawn quickly and easily in the event of urgent questions,” Ms Shrader said.
A key element of OCx’s implementation included using ShoreTel’s open standards-based architecture to integrate a call recording system. Police investigators can choose to record calls with witnesses, suspects, and other persons of interest. “OCx was able to set the system up so that some calls to the police department can be recorded at a touch of a button. This is important for cases that end up in court,” Ms Shrader said. OCx also set up a video arraignment system, in which judges can stay in their chambers to arraign prisoners at county jails located miles away. The system has dramatically increased the efficiency of the process. “OCx’s ability to fine tune features and come up with innovative solutions to our challenges has helped us improve efficiency and has made our staff more productive.” All city departments are now using the ShoreTel phone system. Based on extensive meetings with city department heads, OCx designed the architecture to include numerous workgroups, and more than 30 operating divisions throughout the city are using hunt groups and call handling modes and auto attendants at different times of the day. The system’s flexibility accommodates on-the-fly announcements to alert citizens of snow days, automated call distributions, and multi-lingual greetings.
Ease of use also extends to management simplicity. Two hours after OCx trained the help desk agents, they were able to support internal queries. “ShoreTel’s simple Web-based system management console has made life significantly easier, and we’re much more productive compared to the old system,” Mr Cullingford said. “Now we can use a PC from any desk at the city to make changes in a matter of minutes. We no longer have to call out contractors, or need to invest in specialized phone system certification training.”
Results:
The City of Lakewood Improved Service delivery to constituents using fully integrated communications across all city departments, ensuring calls can quickly be forwarded to the right person.
The City Improved Reliability 24x7x365 while reducing support costs and freeing-up internal staff time.
The City also reduced administrative overhead for system administration, due to the system’s simplicity. Non-technical staff can add & remove users, move users in and out of work groups, etc.
The City uses feature-rich capabilities, customizable work groups and integration with cell phones used by hundreds of mobile workers.
Most important, the City of Lakewood achieved a Lower Total Cost of Ownership for acquiring and maintaining the system on an annual basis going forward. As Lakewood replaced their old PBX phone system with ShoreTel, they found that they could also replace the entire network infrastructure since the cost of implementing ShoreTel was about one third of what the other vendors bid. This savings enabled them to re-cable their remote facilities and replace all of their network switches and routers. During the project the City’s ability to deliver services was not interrupted.
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