Advanced Personnel Systems’ (APS) has announced that its SmartSearch manpower mining Software as A Solution (SaaS) technology and
Evolve IP’s hosted IP Private Branch eXchange (PBX (
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Alert)), were integrated a year ago to provide a joint solution for Intelligent Capital Network (
ICN) that resulted in 30 percent monthly saving for ICN’s telecommunications spend.
Officials at the company say that ICN had selected SmartTech to support its Customer Relationship Management, sales, human resource selection, and staffing management offerings, and to upgrade its IT infrastructure. And, at about the same time, the customer also selected The Evolved Office to get rid its communications dross that was slowing down workflow and pushing targeted deadlines, and provide a more agile, extensible and mobile telecommunications system that would homogenously blend with SmartTech to increase overall productivity.
“Our team says it’s incredible how the new phone system allows us to work smarter and faster, in any environment,” said Jack Smith, Managing Director at ICN. “It is increasing productivity across the board.”
From the day the three way service level agreement was signed, it took the two solution providers six weeks for their joint effort to hit the road running. So effective was the solution that the average monthly savings on the communications bills were 30 percent over a period of a year, and the IT spend on each additional recruiter for ICN reduced by 50 percent since the company had to buy only the equipment – headphones and mic with computer, monitor, and mouse – and not the old proprietary software that significantly stretched budgets.
To further help reduce costs, The Evolved Office has a financial recycling scheme that
buys back customer’s PBX and handsets that are less than 5 years old, pays up $ 150 per user for possession of the PBX, deploys The Evolved Office at no additional capital outlay, eliminates maintenance and Licensing fees, and helps clear out related inventory carrying cost.
Important features of the integrated solution were ‘click-to-dial’ that helped end-users to intuitively register and monitor both outbound and inbound calls, and work from anywhere on the planet that had an Internet connection. All they have to do is plug in their headphones and log on to ICN’s IP PBX system with a secure user name and password, and they have a unique work-anywhere digital office space.
An incidental, opportunistic use could be for people to work remotely from places deemed ‘safe’ since Swine flu, now officially called Influenza A (H1N1) by the World Health Organization,
reported TMCnet, is an illness that some say could soon reach pandemic status, forcing the nation to look at possible alternative methods to continue workflow.
The U.S. federal government’s National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Implementation Plan, the TMCnet
report says, highlights the significant advantages of using telecommunications and broadband connectivity related solutions to continue working remotely and avoid physical proximity, and therefore slow down the disease spread.
“It’s very cool,” said David Scudder, Director of ICN, “We have a lot of young people in the office that embrace this technology because it enables them to work from anywhere and easily integrate into our existing system, saving time and effort.”
The mutually beneficial route of SaaS (
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reported earlier, gives customers the freedom to use and pay for only select components of their choice from software suites, and the flexibility to add other requisites as and when the need arises. Prior to this innovative customer driven request for ‘a use and pay when required only’ approach, entire solutions had to be bought and installed at a significantly higher one-time cost.
IT support resources, the report continues, such as staff, network equipment, installation fees and annual maintenance contracts are kept to a minimum, if not eliminated. With lesser pre-installed information to wade through, systems become more agile and corrective measures require lesser bandwidth, are more focussed and can be done remotely.
Vivek Naik is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Vivek's articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by
Tim Gray
