The background

South West Communications Group becomes Animal’s strategic communications partner providing a cost-effective, leading-edge telephone system, and data and Internet infrastructure solution for its Poole headquarters and high street retail outlets, including the management of more than 300 lines and broadband circuits.

Animal was started in 1987 by 2 surfers who began selling their own device to secure watches in water. Their design-led range extended to clothes and equipment encompassing gear for windsurfing, snowboarding, mountain-biking and skateboarding. Manufacturing has since been outsourced with Animal products being sold via a network of retail outlets across the country.

The challenge

Animal operates from a head office building in Poole along with a 60,000 sq ft warehouse in Upton 8 miles away to accommodate its distribution and design teams as well as its customer-facing retail team totalling 150 staff.

This retail team spends its day gathering orders and feedback from stockists and since the business operates on a just-in-time basis, with stock only being manufactured in response to orders, communication between the supply chain, manufacturers, retail stores, the head office and the warehouse needed to be tightly coordinated. There needed to be a seamless transfer of the telephone, data and Internet network between the old and new site with minimum disruption to both clients and staff.

The nature of Animal’s distribution system also meant there were a lot of internal calls between the staff in the office and the warehouse. This had become expensive and difficult to manage in that Animal’s workforce was becoming increasingly mobile.

The solution

South West Communications Group was selected as the preferred supplier to provide an Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise telephone system with OmniTouch Contact Centre, Cisco data networking equipment, complete with a high speed 10Gb core and a leased line infrastructure, which in a single solution provided Animal with the following:

•    Converged voice & data network
•    Resilient, dedicated high-speed 100Mb Ethernet circuits
•    Centralised operators
•    Contact centre software and hardware
•    Contact centre supervision software
•    Cost savings recording
•    Call routing
•    Dedicated 50Mb Internet leased line
•    Secure virtual private network
•    Disaster recovery and resilience

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