Adairs
commenced trading in Chapel Street, Prahran, Victoria in 1918 and then later
became established as a mini department store, stocking all lines in the drapery
trade including manchester, curtains, ladies wear and haberdashery until 1980.
In 1981, the first of today's chain was opened at Doncaster Shoppingtown and in
1984 stores at Brandon Park, Chadstone, Frankston and Northland were added.
Adairs
is now the largest national specialty manchester retailer and has expanded
considerably since 1984. Our stores are generally located in major
regional shopping centres in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, Western
Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory.
Adairs
were looking for a new PABX solution in mid 2004. Adairs had implemented
an ADSL VPN across all of their sites, so an IP based system would allow all of
their stores to have phones attached to the main PABX. Adairs chose to
test the Asterisk solution as they had an urgent need to start supporting a 1300
IT Support number internally. They decided that this would make a great
test bed for the Asterisk system, and give the IT staff time to learn the system
and decide whether it was a best fit for the company.
After 1
month of testing the system internally, Adairs were happy that the system would
be able to provide the functionality needed by the Adairs Company, and provide
many new features that their current PABX system did not.
Late
2004:
- Adairs bought a new server and a Digium E1 card.
- G729 was chosen for the Store phones, and G711 for Head Office.
- They had an E1 line (20 lines) installed by AAPT.
- They bought, configured and installed 70 phones (one for each site).
- Installed 40 phone at Head Office.
Overall, the first stage of the project was a success. There was some staff
resistance to the new system, but it was minimal. They now had all stores
hooked up to the Head Office PABX, and had reporting on all calls. Adairs
could program the system to handle calls in many ways, with only a minimal
amount of effort.
Early 2005:
- Sent out extra phones to their larger sites (so that larger stores had at
least 2 IP phones).
- Installed a digital fixed-to-mobile gateway.
- Started using ATP servers to handle outgoing calls to Sydney, Brisbane, Perth
and Adelaide.
- Replaced their aging PABX with a new system for a very reasonable cost.
- Gained tremendous range of new features.
- Can now run, service and program PABX themselves.
- Reduced monthly phone bills by 50%
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