BestMed Medical Supplies Corporation sells medical and surgical products and equ
ID: 3906277 • Letter: B
Question
BestMed Medical Supplies Corporation sells medical and surgical products and equipment from over 700 different manufacturers to hospitals, health clinics, and medical offices. The company employs 500 people at seven different locations in western and midwestern states, including account managers, customer service and support representatives, and warehouse staff. Employees communicate via traditional telephone voice services, e-mail, instant messaging, and cell phones. Management is inquiring about whether the company should adopt a system for unified communications. What factors should be considered? What are the key decisions that have to be made in determining whether to adopt this technology? Use the Web, if necessary, to find out more about unified communications and its costs.
Explanation / Answer
Answer: Unified communication is meant for providing uniform ,consistent user experience by enabling convergence and integration of voice, audio, SMS, MMS, audio and video conferencing, IM, VOIP over multiple devices and media types.
The various factors to be considered for adopting unified communication are as follows:
-Compatibility of existing IT infrastructure , architecture and additional resources to support UC
- Abilty of UC to support existing IT applications used for mobility, VOIP, audio and video conferencing,messaging platform etc.
-Network Security requirements and enhancements needed for supporting the various UC products
- Sustainability and scalability of UC and business benefits vs cost of adoption/implementation
- Vendor support during implementation and post implementation of UC
-Agility and flexibility needed to support connected devices and users
-User adoption rate
The key decisions include:
- Project plan for phased implementation of UC rather than a big bang approach and allocation of budget accordingly
- ROI of investment and hurdle rate
- Key metrics to determine end user adoption and track usage, productivity, cost savings
- Framework agreement and escalation matrix for multi vendor Umbrella model to support various UC products and interoperability
-Alignment and integration of business processes
-Selection of on- premise or cloud based UC solution
-Business continuity and disaster recovery plan
- Preparedness of in-house staff to support UC deployment
- Review of network security compliance and policies
The various cost drivers for UC deployment are:
-Implementation cost
-Server costs, licensing costs of server and clients
-End devices ,applications
-Gateways
-LAN, WAN upgrades including POE, UPS, staffing costs
-Management,monitoring tools
-Equipment licenses
-cabling costs, hosting services,
-server centralization
-Staffing costs
-Network costs
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