The POLYPLASTIC Group

Solution

The POLYPLASTIC Group turned again to AudioCodes and deployed the company’s Session Experience Manager (SEM), an integral component in AudioCodes’ recently announced One Voice Operations Center. The system provides IT managers with a comprehensive overview of the network’s status, quality, call control and volume. Subsets of the network can be examined in isolation, and with just a few clicks the IT manager can not only drill down to individual calls but can also analyze specific trends within those calls. SBCs and Media Gateways are excellent points to gain this network view as they are positioned at the entry points to the corporate network from the Service Providers and between corporate sites and are aware of all the media flows going over those links. With SEM, the time to detect and resolve a problem is very short, even if the problem occurs in remote locations. The system allows the IT manager to see exactly what is happening at all points on the network without the need to travel to the location to check the system. With SEM, the POLYPLASTIC Group now has the tools to monitor quality, they have sufficient information to troubleshoot any problems detected and they can actively intervene to head off problems before they cause damage to the network.

The company was experiencing a few problems on their network, both on the SIP Trunk connection from the Service provider as well as voice quality issues with one of the branches. The SEM identified these problems in a single view on the screen. In the case of the connection to the Service Provider, the SEM pointed to a problem with the Average Success Rate (ASR) of the calls. With this information, the POLYPLASTIC Group’s IT Manager was able to immediately see that there was an issue of an unassigned number in the failed calls and that this was a problem on the Service Provider’s side. The problem was reported to the Service Provider who was then able to correct it in short order.

A decrease in voice quality was also identified at one of the branches, however, the cause of the problem wasn’t clear because the Service Provider’s network services worked well for data traffic. Through a simple root cause analysis, the SEM was able to identify a large packet loss in the voice stream that was actually on the Service Provider’s side. Once identified, the problem was rectified quickly.

According to Andrey Ignatov, Head of the POLYPLASTIC Group’s Telephony Department, "Without the SEM, the process of finding the cause of these problems would have taken much longer and would have been far more complicated. Without the SEM, we spent a week of debugging just to find the information relating to the problem. With the SEM, the IT Telephony engineer himself was able to provide the root cause analysis to the network manager as well as provide a clear and precise network picture to the Service Provider in order to quickly resolve the issue." Ignatov added, "The SEM really helps the IT Telephony Manager to see the performance of the existing system and understand how and when to increase the capacity of the VoIP network. There is no question that the SEM helps save operational time and optimizes the quality of the VoIP network."

Results

Prior to implementing the SEM, there was no formal alarm-based system to provide alerts if something wasn’t working right. With SEM, the VoIP engineer is able to monitor the entire network and can immediately see where the problem on the network resides, drilling down as far as the call itself to rapidly and efficiently conduct a root cause analysis.

Without SEM, the POLYPLASTIC Group faced a situation in which critical business services such as telephony, were introduced to the network without proper real-time tools to manage potential problems. Such a situation could result in extended service downtime in remote locations with no real way to rapidly correct the problem.

The ability to rapidly identify (in real time) problems on the network allows for quick correction of problems that exist and for prevention of problems before they occur.

The SEM allows for a cost effective and efficient way to monitor the network as it migrates to a Lync environment.

The SEM provides information about SBC internal call parameters (such as IP group, number manipulation, etc.). This information helps find mistakes in existing or new configurations in routing or number manipulation.

The SEM provides many statistics for company calls. After analyzing these statistics, the POLYPLASTIC Group found a lot of calls where they could change the routing in order to reduce costs (least cost routing). Without SEM, the POLYPLASTIC Group would not have been aware of these statistics and would have continued to pay double the costs for some of these calls.