The background

South West Communications Group helps Central Sussex College consolidate their mix of communications systems into one efficient, cost-effective network.

Central Sussex College was formed when Crawley College and Hayward’s Heath College merged in August 2005. With almost 1,000 staff, the college provides training and education to more than 3,000 full-time and 15,000 part-time students.

The challenge

In response to an urgent need to replace an obsolete telephone system at Hayward's Heath and as a result of the poor service received from Telewest, their existing service provider, in Crawley, the College decided to initiate a project to upgrade its telephony infrastructure.

To support and enable its objectives, the College identified the need for a modern, reliable and flexible communications infrastructure, which was capable of supporting the organisation as it developed and evolved in the future.

The College required a telephony solution to support its staff and students at its 5 key sites in Crawley, Hayward’s Heath, Horsham, East Grinstead and Burgess Hill. They wished to harness the potential of new technology to help deliver cost reductions and wanted to take advantage of its leased line connections from the Crawley campus to the other sites in order to support toll free calling.

The College needed the ability to share operators to make better use of all of its call answering resources to provide an improved and more accountable service to its students. It also wished to use a customisable automated attendant to provide an enhanced level of service to outside callers.

Finally, they required feature transparency between the different locations with the use of common applications platforms and the ability for centralised management to reduce capital and ongoing costs.

The solution

Following a formal tender process, South West Communications Group was awarded the contract to install an Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise communications system together with its call routing service comprising the following:

• Centralised operators
• Auto-attendant, including absence mailbox
• Centralised reporting
• Centralised management
• Cabling infrastructure upgrade
• Cost-effective lines, minutes and call billing services

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