Speed up your PBX deployment time

We all use the phrase “time is money”  and even if we are billing for every minute of time we should be also be looking for ways to streamline our deployment times. The advantages of speeding up our deployment times can mean more profit on a particular job or we can even pass that time savings onto our customers and shave a few bucks off the labor bill. Of course, the larger the size of the deployment, the larger the effect of some of the time savings tips will be.

Planning before all else

In previous articles we have discussed ways to help plan your deployments with site surveys and deployment worksheets. These are excellent tools to ensure that you have as much information at your fingertips as possible when starting your deployment.

System Configuration

One of the biggest time savers I have found is to do virtually all of the system configuration, IVR programming, extension setup, and everything else I can possibly due BEFORE delivering the system to the customer location. The reason for this is that more often than not you will be hammered with multiple interruptions, or clients and/or their IT consultants looking over your shoulder asking tons of questions. Not that you are trying to hide anything from them, but doing all the configuration and setup in your own lab will ensure that it is done properly and done on a more timely schedule. If you have a couple of hours of configuration and extension programming, that’s often a couple of hours that someone from the company will be sitting there with you and they often will get very impatient watching you sitting at a desk typing away. Do this before hand and minimize your time at the client location.

Phone Provisioning

If you are using a system that allows for phone provisioning such as trixbox CE/Pro or 3CX, typing all of the MAC addresses into the system is extremely labor intensive and very prone to human error. A very simple way to speed this process up significantly is with a cheap bar code scanner. Basic scanners can be bought for about $30 and will scan the barcode on the phone’s box and enter it into the text field for the phone system. It may not seem to add up to much, but saving 20 seconds per phone can add up on a good size deployment. I usually don’t even take the phones out of the box, I just scan them, and using a “Sharpie” I write the extension number on the box. So long as you have DHCP scope options setup to work with the phones you are provisioning, all you will need to do is plug the phones into the network and they will get setup automatically.

Utilize Client Resources

There is usually someone within your client’s company that is going to be assigned to help you make sure everything is up and running properly. I like to use this person to my advantage. Since the phone boxes were labeled with the extension on them back in the lab, the client representative is the perfect person to help put the phones on all the desks and then start unboxing them. The typical phone takes 60 seconds to take out of the box, assemble, plug into the network, and place the phone in the right spot on the desk. If you think about this, a 60 station install will require a full hour of this basic unboxing and setup. Using the client resource for this is a huge time saver for you.

Test plan and signoff

While you should have done as much testing as possible back in your lab, you will need to run through a test cycle after everything is installed. I highly recommend building a test plan for this step to not only ensure that everything is tested and working, but also so that the client can sign off on it. The last thing the client needs is any surprises the next day when all of the employees are in the office and the phones start ringing. While I am going to do a complete article on developing a test plan, you should cover as many bases as possible such as:

• Test extension to extension dialing
• Test local and long distance calling
• Test international calling
• Test toll free calling
• Test inbound calling
• Confirm call routing is working as designed
• Test ring groups and call queues
• Test emergency services dialing
• Test voicemail to email
• Test paging and intercom

Summary

While there is nothing really earth-shattering here, we can usually all benefit from making our deployments run more smoothly and efficiently. The smoother your deployments go, the more professional you look and the happier your client will be. If you have additional tips on improving efficiency, please post them in the comments section.

Tags: VoIP Education, VoIP Systems