Smiths News Case Study
By consolidating its support requirements, Smiths News has mitigated risks whilst improving quality of service and reducing costs.’
Smiths News is the UK’s leading wholesaler of approximately 59 million newspapers and magazines every week, supplying 22,000 retailers across England and Wales. In addition Smiths News also manages a recycle returns facility handling almost 6 million unsold newspapers and 5.5 million unsold magazines each week.
Business Needs - In Brief
To manage the risks of telecoms failure, improving overall quality of service and reducing costs.
Solution
Daisy provided a single Service Level Agreement for Smiths News’ legacy systems including maintenance, refurbishment and repair services.
Outcomes
The quality of service has been improved, reducing the risk to the business and overall management costs.
Business Needs - In Detail
Maintaining business communications was a critical factor for Smiths News. Their legacy telecomms platform had evolved from the implementation of a number of PBX telephone systems including Avaya, Nortel and SDX. Each system required its own support contract to maintain continuity of service across the network. The risk to the business and the resulting cost of managing multiple suppliers was proving prohibitive.
Service Level Agreements varied from supplier to supplier and the quality of service was unreliable and inconsistent. Smiths News recognised that they could only mitigate risks to the business, improve quality of service and potentially reduce costs by consolidating and standardising their support contracts.
Solution
With extensive experience in the retail sector, Daisy was ideally placed to provide a maintenance contract to support all of Smiths News’ existing legacy PBX estate. The solution would provide them with access to maintenance, refurbishment and repair services, all under one contract and a single Service Level Agreement.
Outcomes
Daisy’s maintenance support contract has ensured that the existing PBX platform delivers the operational and commercial requirements of the company 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, considerably mitigating risk to the business.
With only one supplier relationship to manage, Smiths News experiences a quicker and more effective response, with access to skilled specialists and a 24/7/365 fault reporting line. The contract with Daisy adds further value for Smiths News with regular access to their professional consultancy and technical support.
Smiths News now has an enhanced level of service, at a reduced cost and delivered by a single technology partner. The underlying platform delivers consistently against reliability targets and any programming changes requested can be implemented promptly and efficiently. More importantly, risks to the business have been significantly reduced.
“The maintenance support that we had received from our previous supplier had proven unreliable at addressing our operational requirements. As an existing partner, managing our call management systems, Daisy were invited to submit a response to our tender for the delivery of maintenance of our PBX estate. Their response was very competitive with a service level agreement that would deliver a four hour response to critical service faults.
Like many organisations, if our phone systems are down, we lose business. The response rates from the team at Daisy have been first-rate and well within the terms of our SLA; even providing additional technical assistance in support of our operations. We have an excellent relationship with the maintenance team and the local engineers. This personal touch further enhancing an already strong business partnership and we look forward to working with them in the future.”
Karen Beard, Telecoms, Senior Engineer, Smiths News
