CDK Global-Voss Solutions Business Communications Operations Management (BCOM) Case Study

11 Dec 2015
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The discussion about the need for Business Communications Operations Management (BCOM) as a critical component in managing the sophistication and complexity of modern multi-vendor UC/Business Communications systems has continued to accelerate through 2015. At the UCStrategies BC Summit (formerly the UC Summit) last week, Michael Finneran and I did a session on management that included a BCOM overview. A number of the consultants, channel partners and end users at the event commented that they saw configuration and operations management as a major challenge and were excited about the potential of using BCOM.

At the same time, the team at VOSS Solutions introduced me to a case studythey have done about the impact of BCOM. While many customers are not ready to talk about BCOM, as they see it as a strategic advantage in the operations, cost and adoption of their next generation business communications systems, CDK Global worked with VOSS and described how their VOSS BCOM deployment has impacted their organization.

CDK Global is the largest global provider of integrated information technology and digital marketing solutions to the automotive retail industry. It has more than 26,000 customers that generate nearly $2 billion revenue, and has been operating for over 40 years. CDK provides a range of solutions for auto retail management, including communications. The company operates a Cisco HCS based hosted communications platform that supports over 120,000 subscriber seats.

Initially the CDK Global team was using traditional operations techniques and bespoke internally-developed tools to manage the churn of configurations in this large base. However, increases in the size of the base, complexity of operations and new capabilities of the BCOM platforms caused CDK Global to reconsider using a commercial product to automate their operations process.

The CDK global team did a trial evaluation of options to see which was best for a set of specific life cycle tasks. Four specific tasks were evaluated (described in detail in the case study link below). In each of these tasks, the value of the BCOM solution was clear.

For example, CDK Global does 30-50 user changes per day (reflecting the dynamic nature of the employment base in the retail automotive industry). Before BCOM, each of these changes required 35 separate entries. With BCOM, the entire process can be invoked with a single command, reducing the time to completion of change from multiple days to minutes. The required BCOM profile/process to drive this dramatic improvement took less than three days to implement.

In fact, the management team at CDK Global found that having this BCOM solution in place reduces the time their engineers spend in new installs by 50%. This has allowed them to use their resources to focus on enhanced features and capabilities, improving both customer stickiness and upsell opportunities.

This is an excellent case study of how BCOM can be transformational. While this case study is focused on a hosted provider, the same factors can be applied to a wide range of UC/BC deployments. The use cases evaluated and the savings would apply equally within most organizations. If you are just hearing about BCOM or are considering it, the CDK Global experience is a great way to see how BCOM can positively impact your UC/BC.

The VOSS/CDK Global BCOM case study can be downloaded HERE.


This paper is sponsored by VOSS Solutions.

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