VOSS M2UC – Major Retail Migration Use Case
January 11, 2021
Tom Turrington, Migration Team Lead, VOSS
We have been working with a significant retail customer in a way that really showcases the power of VOSS M2UC, hence I thought it would be interesting to share with a wider audience.
The customer is migrating from old Call Manager Express (CME) based technology to more modern call control. This is being done at unprecedented scale and in very tight time frames. At the same time the business is looking to deploy much more standardization in configuration. As such, they have fully embraced M2UC in a three-phase project.
Phase 1 – Upgrade the UC platform in all of their tier one flagship stores
For this project, the customer chose to use a fixed template so that each store followed a precise methodology. Each store would adopt the same UC structure, using identical number and phone logic. VOSS M2UC not only excels at automating repetitive actions but has been designed with scalability in mind. It has also been developed to be easy to use.
As such, the customer was able to save money by recruiting a team of low-skilled contractors to quickly and efficiently carry out the UC migrations, store by store, using VOSS M2UC. As VOSS M2UC is highly automated, the contractors were able to complete the migrations with no risk of data slippage, no risk of manual error, and in a highly secure and methodical way – at high speed.
Cost predictions indicate that the customer will complete this phase of the migration with a saving of more than 66% over performing the migration manually. VOSS M2UC also includes benefits that are not necessarily immediately apparent, such as the reputation damage that could be caused by having a long, drawn-out migration with errors creeping in that are inevitable with human input; not to mention the cost of extra post-cutover help desk support that a manual migration would require.
Phase 2 – Upgrade the UC platform in all of their tier two stores
This was much the same as phase one. The customer opted for a highly structured process where each store followed the same UC setup. Once again, low-skilled contractors were able to carry out each migration quickly and efficiently, with minimal support needed from the VOSS team, and with zero impact on the store’s day to day working practises.
Through the many benefits VOSS M2UC provides – reduced labour costs, increased deployment speed and improved accuracy – it is fair to say that the cost savings are substantial. VOSS M2UC is running with a zero error rate, provisioning hundreds of sites each week. Each phase of the migration (culminating in a total of over 1.5 million devices) will be completed in months rather than years.
Again, the predicted savings for the customer for this phase of the migration project are greater than 66%
Phase 3 – Upgrade the UC in 260 distribution centers
This was more interesting and on paper, more challenging. The customer decided that on this occasion they would not follow a standardized approach to the UC migration; in fact each distribution center was able to dictate its own unique UC setup and configuration (dial plan, phone types, number logic). As a result, there was nothing standardized about the migration process; each of the 260 stores would follow an entirely unique path.
This is where the power of M2UC comes to the fore. M2UC is able to handle incoming data, whether it is defined statically or dynamically, in a consistent and repeatable manner, without needing to make assumptions about the data (i.e. hard coding). By introducing rules and logic to M2UC, the same set of unskilled contractors was able to carry out the distribution center migrations, without the need for any hard coding. By modifying the mapping templates and transformation rules that M2UC uses to manipulate the data, the migration of the DCs was able to continue without any notable changes to the process followed by the contractors.
What’s more, the contractors worked with role-based access control, with a clear audit trail of each person’s activity. This ensured that each contractor only had access to – and was only able to make changes to – their area of the project.
The speed of this entire migration project is notable; the contractors have been able to migrate
100 locations a week, amounting to millions of end users. Couple the speed and efficiency of the migration project with the customer’s decision to use unskilled staff, and costs have remained impressively low.
With the VOSS M2UC automation processes now in place, the customer’s future migration projects will be quick and easy to carry out, empowering them to manage their own UC migration projects without the need for intervention or support from VOSS, and without the need to employ highly skilled and expensive contractors.
To talk to VOSS about your UC migration requirements, please contact us.
