Providing telecommunications visibility to the European Commission
The site of European institutions since 1952, Luxembourg capital is one of the three institutional seats of the European Union. With no less than 12 institutions or services related to the European Union, the capital of the Grand Duchy accommodates several thousand people responsible for working on European administration. This translates into the permanent presence of some 12,600 European officials.
The telephony platform used within the European Commission, consists of a total of 60 000 fixed and mobile phones. Due to the use of various telephony providers; differing contracts; multiple collaborator locations or sites and heterogeneous databases/tools where telephony data is stored; it is currently cumbersome for the telephony administrators to have a clear view of telephony usage. This would include phone call history, up to date extracts of devices, subscriptions and real time call billing verification.
The challenge put forward by the European Commission to Flexcom, was to deliver an easy-to-use solution, able to automatically centralize telephony data and to provide specific KPI’s.
SUMMARY
Discover the main aspects of this challenge and how the Flexcom Analytics solution provided the answer below :
Centralization
Centralized tool that collects the European Commission’s fixed and mobile call data (this data represents nearly 60,000 different numbers).
Supplied with a range of native connectors, Flexcom Analytics is designed to collect raw call data from any IPBX and any mobile provider, consolidate this data with the Commission’s organization and finally provide automatic and on-demand reports. Whatever the structure of the raw data gathered, Analytics standardizes the information and makes it available through a single friendly GUI. Smart filtering capabilities and a powerful reporting engine provides a global usage view of all lines: by department, location or site, by period or users
Taxation
Verify the taxation applied by the different telephony providers of the Commission
Analytics is able to determine the real cost for each call. The solution includes a customizable pricing grid according to different telephone providers and contracts. All unit price calls from each provider used by the Commission are encoded into this pricing grid. Depending on the many parameters of the call (origin and destination, gateway used, duration, day of week and time of the calls), the cost is calculated according to the contract provider rules. Each month, a crosscheck report is automatically generated by Analytics to reveal possible differences between the provider invoice and the real calculated cost.
Compliance
Integrated with the Commission’s IT system and comply with GDPR (data anonymization, configurable data retention period)
One of the requirements of the European Commission was to integrate the solution into the on-premise IT platform, by ensuring compliance with security rules and GDPR. The Analytics database contains user’s personal information and their call detailed activity. Automatic mechanisms are configured in Analytics, to both anonymize data after a configurable period and to purge old data. Moreover, access to the application is controlled by RBAC (role-based access control group) and all access to the application is audited.
Scalable
Scalable and able to collect data from any type of telephone exchange
Analytics is very flexible and is designed to fully adapt to multi-vendor support. The modular design allows Analytics to be easily configured to fit with the future evolution of the telephony environment and mobile provider contracts. Today the solution gathers the main part of the fixed telephony data from a Hipath IPBX and Cisco on premise, tomorrow Analytics will also gather data from Microsoft. In addition, if mobile contracts or mobile providers are changed at the Commission, the change will be applied to Analytics with ease.
Delegable
Accessible for different user profiles: admin, department heads and end users
With its native user profile feature, different access levels were configured in Analytics for use by the Commission. A global admin profile with access to all information but personal related ones; a supervisor profile with access to specific sites and geographies; an end user profile – allowed to see only their own calls and data. Furthermore, an auditor role was also designed to allow deep but traceable investigation. The intuitive user-friendly interface and easy to use application, means that there was no long and expensive training sessions to plan in order to use the solution.
Inventory
Up-to-date inventory of fixed phones, mobiles and SIM cards, as well as subscriptions
Analytics can connect to any database and any third-party to gather device and telephone equipment information. IP Phone and softphone information is collected from the Commission’s IPBX every day. The status of the phone, the line, the user associated to the phone and even the technical configuration of phones is retrieved.
In addition, mobile devices and SIM cards plus associated subscriptions, are imported every month – this inventory is consolidated with the Commission’s organization. A report is produced showing a global view of active and inactive devices, unassigned mobile phones/SIM cards and devices that are not used. Another report gives an overview of the number of devices, models and telephony equipment by department.