Liontrust turns to unified communications to meet compliance and reduce costs. Liontrust is an investment management company that was founded in 1994 and was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1999.

Liontrust provides portfolio management services in UK and European equities and in fixed income securities. These are managed on a long-only, long/short and absolute return basis through unit trusts, individual savings accounts (ISAs), offshore funds, pooled pension funds and segregated institutional accounts.  The company markets its investment products to professional investors, predominantly in the UK and Continental Europe. These include pension funds and other institutional investors, family offices, private banks, private client managers, multi-managers, stockbrokers and financial advisers. The company employs 45 staff at its offices in Central London.

Challenge – Replacing an old telephone system that was expensive to run and did not meet the company’s existing & future business strategy

IT Manager at Liontrust, David Little explains, “Our existing traditional phone system from Toshiba was coming to the end of its life and we needed to upgrade it so it could support how our company wanted to work.  The old hardware based system was costly to manage and maintain and lacked some of the key features that we needed such as conferencing and comprehensive call recording.”

“Due to the nature of our operation, we also wanted the option to support remote and/or flexible working, because many employees such as sales are on the road or other departments such as IT and operations sometimes need to work from other locations.”

YO! Sushi is one of the world’s fastest growing restaurantchains. Established 10 years ago by entrepreneur Simon
Woodroffe, YO! Sushi specialise in delivering high quality, Japanese style ‘Sushi’ food to its customers via its now famous conveyor belt system. In the UK, the company has around 35 restaurants and has aggressive plans to roll-out a further 15 outlets within the next 12 months. In addition to its ‘eat-in’ business the company also offers a home delivery service to.

The business Challenge – Doubling the size of its business, reducing the overheads, and overcoming the limitations of an unmanageable ageing telephony system.

All of the UK based restaurants, with the exception of Gatwick Airport, are owned and operated by YO! Sushi from its headquarters in London. The manager of each establishment has responsibility for sourcing fresh ingredients
locally, but all other functions such as administration, payroll and pricing are conducted centrally. As the number of restaurants increased it became apparent that the company needed to implement a technology solution that
could embrace all their operational activities, such as credit card processing, Electronic Point of Sale (EPoS), telephony and data into a single IP based network.

This would provide a number of benefits, including the ability to manage the whole of the IT network as a single entity, a massive reduction in BT line costs, the ability to converge their entire workforce onto a single telephony network, and reduce the mobile phone costs of regional managers and other employees who needed to travel between outlets.

The key technical challenge however was their incumbent traditional circuit-switched telephony system which was designed to work autonomously and therefore could not be integrated into a single managed solution. IT Manager at YO! Sushi, Billy Waters explains the problem, “At the time we had 20 outlets, located mostly around the London area and each one had a key system installed which was linked back to our head office via BT exchange lines.

Haley’s Ltd, established in 1989, are a unique nationwide construction and property consultancy that offers a versatile and comprehensive portfolio of services to both clients and contractors.

Industry Sector:  Facilities Management

Romec relies on Swyx to service over 25,000 customers

Originally the Royal Mail Engineering & Construction division of The Post Office, Romec was created in 1989 to provide dedicated facilities and engineering-related services to the Royal Mail Group. In 2000 Romec was launched as a fully-fledged facilities management company and since then has added big brands such as Marks & Spencer, Camelot and Sainsbury’s to its portfolio.  The company now employs over 4,500 staff at multiple locations throughout the UK.

With the responsibility of responding to over 4,000 service calls per days, from over 25,000 sites including the likes of The Post Office, Sainsbury’s and other major blue chip organisations, Romec prides itself on delivering a highly efficient service that sets it apart from other FM providers.

With 200 operators servicing calls across three sites in Warrington, Leeds and head office in Stockport, Romec’s telephone system is paramount to the success of its operation.   When the old circuit switched system began to struggle under the strain, the information services (IS) management team knew it was time invest in a new solution that would provide greater flexibility and functionality.
IS Services Manager at Romec, Stuart Keating explains, “ At Romec we manage all the service elements of a facility including; intruder alarms, power, gas, water, air conditioning, in fact anything that involves the smooth running of an operation.

Typically when an alarm or call comes in, the operator needs to know what takes priority so they can take the necessary steps to handle it.  For instance this may involve calling a facility manager, a sub-contractor or in the case of an intruder alarm the relevant key-holder. It is important that the call is answered promptly by operators who have the necessary skill set, or if they are not available, the call needs to be automatically routed to next person in the group.  Furthermore it is essential that if for any reason we have a power or any other infrastructure failure at any of our sites the system can route calls to a back-up facility. Business continuity is critical to both ours and our clients’ operations.”

Keating continues, “Our incumbent system had been installed for some time and was struggling to cope with the demands we were putting on it. To improve the efficiency of our operation we also needed new functionality such as on-line presence, so we could immediately see from any location who is logged on and who is not. We also wanted support for remote working, so operators could be based from any location, complete call integrity between all three sites for disaster recovery purposes and simple to use call recording for training and dispute resolution.”