City Facilities Management

Company Background

City Facilities Management (City FM) offers a full suite of end-to-end facilities management services to partners across North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. Established in 1985 in Glasgow, Scotland, City Facility Management is one of the world’s largest privately held integrated facility management companies.

The company provides maintenance/engineering, technical procurement, and support to some of the largest Fortune 100 retailers, grocers, and convenience stores.

City FM has over 12,000 employees with offices in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Telephony Challenges

In 2023, net2phone started having discussions with City FM about how we could help them overcome some of their telephony challenges. Below is a brief summary of their setup prior to migrating to net2phone.

• City FM had 850 Microsoft Teams users divided between 5 different office locations:  US, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong.

  • Some offices were using Microsoft as their primary telephony provider for inbound and outbound termination.

  • Other offices were set up with on-premise session border controllers (SBCs) connected to the local in-country providers via legacy TDM trunks.

• City FM was not happy with their design, routing the telephony traffic through a hybrid deployment model. They wanted to consolidate all Microsoft Teams telephony traffic to one provider using the same Direct Routing cloud solution for all offices.

• City FM was concerned about their telephony costs utilizing expensive Microsoft Teams plans for their international and domestic traffic. They also did not want to continue to maintain SBCs and legacy time-division multiplexing (TDM) trunks in some countries.

net2phone Solution

Our net2phone solution involved migrating all City FM Microsoft Teams users off of their on-premise SBCs to our cloud solution. In order to achieve separate billing for each office as well as full network redundancy, we created separate SIP trunks for Microsoft Teams Direct Routing connected to dedicated SBCs based on the geographic location of each office (US, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong). We were also able to decommission their SBCs as well as their legacy TDM trunks.

Below is a summary of the benefits of using our solution:

• Geo-redundancy for all City FM offices - We removed the single point of failure (local on-premise SBCs) from the previous City FM deployment minimizing their risk of outages. We also deployed multiple SIP trunks in various regions and removed their local TDM trunks from routing.

• Improved call routing – We optimized the call routing on all City FM traffic by deploying SBCs in the same region as their Microsoft Teams users. The SIP and real-time transport protocol (RTP) traffic was routed to our closest net2phone points of presence (POPs), minimizing the round-trip latency on the calls. We were also able to give them access to our specialized net2phone Global Connect routes, providing them with in-country termination using their local DIDs.

• Improved call analytics and separate billing – By creating separate SIP trunks for each City FM office, we were able to give them better visibility on the telephony costs per office. We also provided them with portal access and a syncing tool for each office that their Microsoft Teams administrators can use to add additional users to our platform on demand. Customer call detail reports for each office were also created for City FM.

• Cost Saving – There was a significant cost saving for City FM after migrating their traffic to our telephony solution. City FM now benefits from savings on support and maintenance contacts, SIP licensing fees, data center co-location costs, equipment costs, and termination costs.

If you want to enhance your company’s communication capabilities, contact us today! Our experts will create a unique solution tailored to your unique business needs.