Case study
•
Telecommunications
first class mail
Neopost is a leading player in the mailroom equipment market.
The group offers the most advanced solutions for mailing systems,
folders, inserters and addressing, as well as traceability for letters
and parcels. The range of its services is broad, and includes
consulting, maintenance, financing solutions and online services.
So successful is Neopost in the provision of these products and
services that it is Europe’s biggest mailroom equipment supplier,
and number two in the global market. In 2006, it turned over
nearly a billion Euros, had seven offices in the UK alone, and
worldwide employed some 4,900 people in 14 countries.
Posting times
Every company with such a sizable workforce faces the challenge
of keeping track of its people. Every time an employee is
recruited, leaves, moves desk, transfers to a new site, or changes
responsibility, it is likely to require an update of the organization’s
two key ICT (information and communications technology)
directories: the one that governs computer systems and the one
that enables the telephony infrastructure to route calls correctly.
Inevitably, it is time consuming and expensive to implement these
moves and changes (MACs), and almost every company struggles
to keep both directories up to date and in alignment.
2 Alcatel-Lucent Neopost, UK
When the ICT team at Neopost UK decided to automate and
streamline their ICT directory management processes, they
called in Alcatel-Lucent Professional Services. According to
Keir Brancoft, a project manager with Neopost, that was a great
move. He comments: “Continuing in a manual environment
would have been very expensive and far from ideal. Although it
is difficult to give exact figures, the Alcatel-Lucent solution has
undeniably allowed us to make substantial savings as there is up
to 50 per cent less maintenance and administration required.”
aDDress listings
One of the two directories that had to be kept up to date was
Microsoft Active Directory. This is a distributed directory
service that enables centralized, secure management of an entire
network across one or more sites. It is a central component of
the Windows platform, and provides the means to manage the
“The Alcatel-Lucent solution has
undeniably allowed us to make substantial
savings as there is up to 50 per cent less
maintenance and administration required.”
Keir Brancoft, project manager, Neopost UK