Carrier Services - Accrington & Rossendale College

Untying the Telecoms Knot Releases £5,000 Savings

By untying a knot of supplier contracts Pennine Telecom not only significantly cut telephony bills but made life a whole lot more simple for Accrington & Rossendale College.

You can hear the incredulity in the voice of Ric Kelly, IT Manager at Accrington & Rossendale College (accross) as he says: “Pennine do all that on our behalf and it doesn’t cost us anything, it actually saves us money. Now that’s some going!”

The ‘All that’ Ric refers to is providing a single point of contact for dealing with faults on lines serving a 500 extension telephone system after Pennine took over responsibility for the Lancashire college’s line and minutes billing from a knot of suppliers.

But that’s just a small part of a story which first began when accross tried to untie that knot - which resulted with staggering savings of some £5,000 annually. “The people who used to manage the telephone lines had gone for routing contracts and we ended up with four providers,” recalls Mr. Kelly. “The problem was we had so many bills it was getting unmanageable and we couldn’t actually prove whether we were getting real, significant savings. So then we decided we’d consolidate everything with our main provider but they said they couldn’t help us, that it was too confusing. They said to us you’ll have to go away and cancel this and do this, that and the other.”

Unimpressed he turned to Pennine. “Basically we wanted to hand over the headache because it was an absolute nightmare. At first we were sceptical whether Pennine could help as all our existing providers had said they could switch

the lines over, put us on a single contract and provide simple invoicing.  In reality Pennine Telecom are the only people who’ve actually managed to deliver that.”

The route from expensive complexity to cost-saving simplicity was also painless. “We supplied Pennine with copies of our bills and they produced all the reports noting the contract dates, the services running, why we’d need to keep them, what we needed to swap and what we could and couldn’t do. That was a level of information that no-one else managed to supply across our full bills.”
This role as an independent broker very much meets with Mr. Kelly’s approval. “Another provider would just report if something was with them, with a different carrier or wasn’t compatible with them and that would be it. Pennine told us what we needed to do, alternatively, they offered to go away and do it on our behalf and what a difference that made. They did all the switching over, the cancelling of contracts and all that kind of stuff etc. Our nightmare became theirs and we ended up with a very simple, straightforward bill containing all the college’s lines, plus more savings than we originally thought we could achieve simply by consolidating.”