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May 16 2016

French Consulting and the Cloud

jtowner@townerkc.com Blog cloud, consulting, mitel

French consulting and their success with the Cloud! From Telephones to Collaboration in the Cloud: fully revealing the skills and assets of companies by exchange and communication
The company telecoms experience in the Cloud era

Each technological transition creates an opportunity for transformation. Today it is worth taking advantage of the transition triggered by the Cloud to entirely rethink how we use and adopt communication and exchange systems in companies. Fixed telephones have been an integral part of all employees’ tools for several decades – they are indicators of the existing internal and external communication processes within companies that were often set up when the company first began operation.

However, faced with a wave of new digital communication tools driven by the consumer space, the high adoption of smartphones among young people and the rise of free software-based telephone services such as Skype, the office telephone has to fight to get its place back, adapt and demonstrate that it is compatible with digital integration. It is time for organisations to rediscover how to use the good old landline in the office.

Consulting

The fixed telephone continues to be an effective communication tool for business exchange because it generates social links with coworkers, customers and suppliers. However, it is nonetheless true that the landline is no longer seen as an end in itself. It is no longer simply an isolated element, but is integrated into a coherent whole of ‘unified communications’, or more broadly ‘collaboration’. This integrated whole must tie together a series of communication modes that go beyond simple phone use:

Mobility (within company premises and outside of the company) that allows interactivity between the fixed office phone and the personal mobile phone
Convergence between voice, video and mobile communications
Integration with information systems (directory, rules of control and oversight, security, messaging, work station, tablet, Web 2.0 Intranet with phone plug-in)
Applications led communications and tools for specific business units and needs e.g. telesales units or support centers
Measurement and control with performance charts and business indicators for inbound and outbound communication streams.

Why do we need company telephone services in the Cloud?

Today a telephone service can be considered as a digital commodity that can be offered ‘as a service’ from a platform in the Cloud, with well defined user profiles according to the type of use (Basic, Standard, Premium, VIP etc.). The outsourcing of telephony services via a central switchboard is not new, but today the user experience must be rich, unified, multi-device and offer a full range of communication applications.

One major advantage of the Cloud model lies in its use/cost ratio in that can support most types of end point and use, is replicable and can be scaled to suit the needs of each business.

From Telephones to Collaboration in the Cloud

Towner Communications can provide you with the Collaboration as a Service (CaaS) model, which is a strong business accelerator that is set to open up a new age of innovation and exchange in companies (whether they are ready or not!). Innovation and exchange within companies are facilitated by flexible uses, the optimisation of the sharing of ideas, and the simplicity of collaborative tools that engage all coworkers in innovation rather than just an elite segment.

Enabling employees to unveil their skills, energy and talent through communication and exchange with coworkers, partners and customers

The Cloud creates new possibilities for communication and consulting. Cloud-based collaboration certainly provides the most functional level for employees, regardless of location or job function, for tasks including simple telephone calls, unified and instant messaging, presence control, multi-media contact centers, web conferencing, mobile and video communications.

We are entering a post-PC era with the arrival of new devices and multi-platform and multi-system work stations (PC, Mac, or virtual workstation in the Cloud). Personal smart phones and tablets are supplementing or replacing company mobile phones and are extending the functional capabilities or remote and mobile of employees.

These new features and functions can be complex for certain companies can be quite complex and the ‘as a service’ model allows companies to choose the functional profile that is best suited to their user communities and offers flexibility to match changes in the users and activities within the organisation.

A billing model that reduces costs

The pay-as-you-go billing model reduces (and may even eliminate) capital expenditures for investment (CAPEX) and therefore transforms the classic purchase model into a model that’s based on an operating budget (OPEX).

New investment can instead be devoted to developing critical and strategic business applications.

The monthly management of Cloud-based communications provides financial predictability for business units. In addition, information technology divisions can play their role in planning in-house supply, encouraging digital experiments via cooperation portals, driving partnership with vendors to facilitate digital services as well as providing advice, deployment services, training and change management.

The measured value of the Cloud-based collaboration model

The value of Cloud-based collaboration would be greatly diminished if it resulted in standardisation and uniformity and restricted employee uses to the least common denominator. Fortunately however, this model recognises the value and individuality of each company and provides tools for measuring and displaying productivity gains in several key areas:

Augmenting the commercial value of the company

Up until now the tried and tested technologies of customer contact and call centers were reserved for large companies with a high volume of interactive voice services. Today, the advanced features of interactive call servers measure the quality of response to customers and the options available for on-demand contact centers allow a company to transform a community of users into contact center workers. Imagine the impact of this tool for a marketing campaign to launch a new product with support from all employees or a perfectly synchronised telephone reminder to all customers regarding an event in the life of the company or better coordinated and therefore more effective crisis management.

Boosting innovation and the concept of idea sharing

As companies must constantly improve their bottom line, often with lower resources, they have to innovate more effectively, create more new products, design or rework processes to be more efficient and also to recruit the most talented, creative and skilled staff possible. Web conferences can be used to rapidly train sales staff on new products and processes.

Push the borders of your company

With Cloud-based solutions you can take advantage of federating options such as directories or presence information and invite customers and partners to share their experience via audio conferences or video webinars (that can be recorded and played back via a simple Internet connection).

Cloud-based telephone services and collaboration are a solid foundation for the future and will drive innovation and collaboration. Even if the two models of the purchase of on-site solutions and SaaS consumption still coexist, the leaders in collaborative solutions will continue to invest much more in the Cloud because it provides future-proofing, quicker user adoption, lower operational risk, and greater satisfaction for users and customers. The Cloud is therefore a strong foundation for agility and innovation as well as sharing and information exchange.

Collaboration in the Cloud contributes to the transformation and optimisation of communications and exchange systems within companies and offers a unified, simple, practical and effective experience that will enable them to fully realise the assets of their people and processes in order to better serve their customers. That, after all, is one of the fundamental values of the business world.

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April 29 2016

Cloud. The real deal! Cloud Myths Busted!

jtowner@townerkc.com Blog Business Communications, cloud, Cloud Communications, Collaboration, Customer Experience, Growth, Midsize Business, mitel

For many, the cloud is still a mystery. In fact, there’s so much complexity surrounding it that, for a wary IT manager, things can easily become foggy. Do a Google search right now on “cloud computing,” and you’ll find thousands of varying results—some nice and others not so much. So, how can IT teams dig deep to discover the truths of the cloud? Two words: the numbers.

It may seem that not a day goes by that a skeptical IT manager isn’t discrediting the cloud, but don’t be fooled—the numbers never lie. Let’s take a look at a few of the most common cloud myths.

cloud myths _0

MYTH 1: The cloud is only a way to save money

For some reason, a lot of people believe that one—if not the only—benefit of the cloud is cost savings. Sure, the majority of C-level executives reported an annual cost savings of over 20 percent after moving legacy applications to the cloud, but cost-savings are only one of many great advantages of embracing cloud communications.

MYTH 2: The cloud doesn’t offer customized solutions

The cloud isn’t a bland, one-way-street kind of solution. In actuality, many cloud offerings feature configuration parameters, application programming interfaces and unique integration capabilities that adapt to the needs of the user. In fact, over half of SMBs surveyed by Microsoft said that they turn to the cloud because they have so many different applications and infrastructures, and the cloud offers a single, easy-to-use way of supporting them.

MYTH 3: The cloud isn’t secure

This likely tops skeptics’ lists of cloud insecurities; however, the truth is that cloud security concerns often are unfounded. In fact, the only reason security is a main concern is because of a lack of IT initiative. Consider that over half of IT and IT security practitioners admitted to lacking a formal strategy to govern moving data, according to IBM.

Now when you’re stuck at the water cooler or in the kitchen next to an IT guy, you’ll have something pretty interesting to chat about. Throw these facts and stats out there and you’ll impress even the most seasoned IT manager. Ready for MYTH 4? Check out our nine cloud myths slideshow here.

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April 28 2016

Are You Easy To Do Business With?

jtowner@townerkc.com Blog Business Communications, mitel, Mobile, Productivity, Towner Communications

The things you’re likely to hear among your social circle aren’t that different from what your customers talk about when it comes to business. Just as you might spend Friday night at your favorite bar talking about everything and anything amongst your closest group of friends, your customers are swapping stories that include their experiences with the kind of service your brand delivers—whether they realize it or not. They’re pushing carts past each other at the grocery store, sitting next to each other at the nail salon and bumping into each other at the gym. These are all perfect times to chat about what’s on their minds, and you don’t want it to be negative blows to your business.

Let’s not pretend like we haven’t heard this kind of talk before: “Ugh, I was on the phone for almost an hour with the most annoying call center agent.” or “Why do they make it so hard to sort out a minor issue?”

According to a 2012 Global Customer Service Barometer conducted by Echo, customers are twice as likely to share their bad customer service experiences rather than talk about good ones. So, the question here is simple: How easy is it for customers to do business with you?

If your customers are putting your business down, the reason may have nothing to do with the staff or strategies you employ. Rather, it could have everything to do with the technology you deploy. For example, research from Forrester shows that 42 percent of service agents are unable to efficiently resolve customer issues solely due to disconnected systems, archaic user interfaces and multiple applications.

The answer? Unified communications (UC). Empowering your service agents with unified communications solutions like Web and video chat helps them get to the root of customer issues and inquiries with lightning speed; meanwhile, presence, conferencing and mobility capabilities enable your internal team to stay dynamic and team-ready to support your customer base.

Click here to begin exploring your UC options with Towner Communications.

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April 18 2016

Team Collaboration, Can You Compete

jtowner@townerkc.com Blog Business Communications, Collaboration, Customer Experience, Midsize Business, mitel, Productivity

Team Collaboration-Battlefield

At Towner Communications, we have a great collaboration tool, MiTeam. But it’s not the only great collaboration tool in the world. In fact, users have a lot of choices when it comes to team collaboration, and many of their best choices—such as Slack—don’t come from big companies at all.

Not that I’m suggesting that Slack is the only answer for collaboration. Or MiTeam, for that matter. Where collaboration is concerned, it’s clearly a multiple-choice market with everyone choosing the app that works best for them in a given situation. But there are trends emerging in the collaboration space that would seem to favor the little guys over the big guys:

Trend #1: Email use is declining

Unified email/voicemail is a big selling point for unified communications (UC) platforms, but it’s not such a big deal to the millennials who will soon make up the majority of the workforce. Many millennials rarely, if ever, check their voicemail (myself included) and email use is clearly declining in favor of text/IM and in-app communications.

Trend #2: There are a lot of good, free apps to pick from

Just as consumers don’t want to pay a premium for long-distance voice or texting, collaboration is quickly being perceived as a low-cost commodity because of the influx of free or “freemium” apps available. The big UC platforms will need to adapt to this trend by offering richer services and/or free features.

Trend #3: In-app is where it’s at

Even business users are drowning in apps at the moment, which limits the value of new apps—no matter how cool they are. The real value for collaborative apps lies in their ability to keep users in the app experience as long as possible, and that means adding more interoperable tools and feature.

Trend #4: App mash-ups will drive innovation

Expect to see UC features condensed into apps as developers spend more time combining collaborative functionality into a simpler, single-app interface. The UC environments of tomorrow will be as simple to use as an app like Slack is today.

What does it all mean?

The competition between larger UC platform providers and smaller app developers is clearly a good thing for collaboration because it accelerates innovation and fosters integration. After all, the “U” in UC is all about unity, and the more communications features you can bring into a single environment, the better collaboration you’ll have. On that front, expect both big players and smaller start-ups to meet somewhere in the middle as they look to serve customers better.

To see how one big company is adapting to the changing landscape, check out team collaboration tool MiTeam >

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March 29 2016

Team Collaboration Shaves Your Day

jtowner@townerkc.com Blog Business Communications, cloud, Cloud Communications, Collaboration, Midsize Business, mitel, Mobile

Here’s something to think about the next time you’re listening to music on hold: How much time does inefficient communication drain from your workday? The answer may surprise you.

The average knowledge worker, according to some estimates, spends more than one hour every day simply trying to communicate with people: checking emails, setting up meetings, leaving voicemails, etc.

And that doesn’t take into account the delays that result as you wait for people to check those emails or voicemails and get back to you.

Fortunately, there’s a great way to trim this waste out of your workday, and it doesn’t require that you go on a communications diet. In fact, you can communicate and collaborate all you want—and keep saving time as you do it. The secret is to unify your communications in the cloud. By putting all of your communications and collaboration tools into one application and hosting it in the cloud, you can trim seventy minutes or more from your workday and get more done. Here’s how.

1. Stop checking multiple messaging apps (Save 40 minutes per day)

Studies show that workers spend as much as 40 minutes (or more) each day checking and re-checking different messaging applications including email, voicemail, texts/IMs and other apps. With unified communications (UC) in the cloud, all messages can be corralled into a single app and screen, so you don’t need to open up and check multiple apps, multiple times per day. And with services like voicemail-to-text, you can save even more time by converting your voicemails into email messages.

2. Reach colleagues right away (Save 30 minutes per day)

Find-me/follow-me, call forwarding, single-number service—call it what you will, when calls go directly to the right person rather than their voicemail, it saves a lot of time. (On the other side of that coin, it can take eight hours or more before a person listens to their voicemails.) Factor in presence-based communications tools that let you know when called parties are available, and you can cut down your phone-tag time by half an hour every day.

3. Don’t juggle other people’s calendars (Save time and your sanity)

Arranging a multi-party conference call can feel like herding cats; as soon as one gets in line, another escapes. Cloud-based UC tools simplify real-time collaboration by allowing you to launch a video- or audio conference on the fly, or view colleagues’ status to see when they’re available.

4. Have the answers now—and not when you’re back in the office (Save time, gas and customer relationships)

Knowledge workers need access to critical, and often sensitive, business information from wherever they’re working: at home, at a client site, on the road, etc. Cloud-based communications allow employees to quickly locate and retrieve information in real time from any device—and not just when they’re back in the office at their computer. That means customers can get answers faster, and stay happier longer.

Of course, not all cloud solutions are created equal. You need to consider cost, complexity, security, reliability and compatibility with the tools you use today. And when everything is considered, more companies choose Mitel for their business cloud communications than any other provider in the world.

Learn more about Towner Communications and the MiTeam cloud collaboration suite >

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March 21 2016

Choosing A Hybrid Cloud Provider

jtowner@townerkc.com Blog Business Communications, cloud, Cloud and Clear, cloud comma, Growth, Hybrid cloud, mitel, technology

Hybrid Cloud Provider

These days, it seems as though there are as many cloud service providers as there are clouds in the sky, so how do you know which hybrid cloud is right for your business communications? After all, different business applications have different requirements for scalability, performance and latency—what works for a CRM application, for example, might not work for real-time videoconferencing. To add more confusion, businesses offer a variety of cloud options to choose from, including private, public and hybrid cloud solutions. In order to help provide some clarity, here are four questions that can help you choose the right path to the cloud for your business.

1. What happens when my network goes down?

Business continuity and disaster recovery are critical for many business applications, but particularly for business communications. If your call center is unreachable for an hour, it begins to have a significant impact not only on bottom-line revenue but also on your brand’s image. A private cloud is ultimately only as strong as the wide area network (WAN) that supports it, while a public or hybrid cloud system can usually offer greater degrees of resiliency through geo-redundancy (i.e., hardware deployed in multiple, geographically distinct data centers).

2. Is my data really secure in the cloud?

This is where on-premises models tend to have the advantage, because they allow the enterprise to have granular control over policy and security. Especially in industries, like finance and healthcare, where industry compliance is a necessity (e.g., SOX, PCI, HIPAA), on-premises systems can provide an important extra layer of security. Many enterprises opt for a hybrid cloud model for this reason, as it affords them the best mix of security (on-premises) and cost-efficient scalability (public cloud).

3. What happens if we outgrow our current hybrid cloud?

It’s not unusual to see an enterprise roll out communications into the cloud in stages, often beginning with voice and eventually adding unified communications (i.e., audio/videoconferencing, collaboration, email, etc.) and even contact center. With a private cloud, enterprises still need to deploy hardware and software in order to add capacity, which takes time and reduces enterprise agility. With a hybrid cloud solution, enterprises can seamlessly scale up internal communications quickly without deploying additional hardware and—just as importantly for businesses with seasonal communications spikes—scale it down again.

4. How quickly can I add new offices and remote users?

In both public and private cloud models, automated provisioning is a key advantage, as it allows IT departments to quickly add new users or even entire offices to networked communications and applications using role-based templates. A hybrid cloud can simplify this process even further by providing secure access to those applications whether the office/user is connected to the corporate WAN or not. An example would be a contact center that uses a mix of on-premise and remote agents; using a hybrid cloud would allow all agents to access the same tools even if they’re using different networks to access them.

Ultimately, choosing a cloud communications provider is a personal decision based on your business’ unique personality. Cost, reliability, features, voice quality, compatibility and security are all considerations that weigh into the final decision, and each may be weighted differently depending on your business requirements. It’s one of the main reasons why we don’t offer a single cloud option, but a family of cloud solutions under Towner Communication’s MiCloud brand.

Learn More About Cloud Here

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March 3 2016

MiTeam Collaboration for Next-Gen Mobile Team Collaboration

jtowner@townerkc.com Blog Business Communications, Collaboration, mite, mitel

On January 28, attendees packed into the Ewerk venue in Berlin to hear what’s next in communications. We covered major announcements in several key areas. Here’s a brief recap of our team collaboration announcement from Towner Communication.

96% of executives cite lack of collaboration or ineffective communications as the main source of workplace failures. (Salesforce)

Companies are looking for ways to break down barriers, increase productivity, improve collaboration and do these all things in real-time. These same companies are realizing the shift to mobile technology provides great opportunities to address these challenges.

Businesses deserve a mobile-first team collaboration tool with real-time, native integration that supports the way teams work today. With MiTeam Collaboration, they get just that. With instant collaboration, work teams can initiate on-the-go screen sharing, content collaboration, voice and video meetings and seamlessly extend them to participants outside of the work environment, including partners, vendors and customers. Towner MiTeam Collaboration is a workflow-oriented application with project and topic-based work streams that’s embedded into existing Mitel technology.

Imagine a world where you could collaborate with team members through meetings, conversations, content collaboration, and project management. Imagine having services like Dropbox, Salesforce, Evernote and Google Drive integrated with your mobile devices to improve collaboration and increase productivity. Imagine seamless communications, open collaboration and 40 percent less emails—all in one environment. You can stop imagining and open your eyes to real-time communications with MiTeam, team collaboration built for today’s mobile enterprise.

Learn more about MiTeam >

Watch the Mitel Next broadcast from Berlin January 2016 >

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February 18 2016

Unified Messaging Keep Remote Employees Connected

jtowner@townerkc.com Blog mitel, Towner Communications, Unified Messaging

Allowing employees to work remotely boosts productivity, boosts morale and gives your organization greater flexibility. If you work for a government agency, educational institution or nonprofit, you know that working remotely is already commonplace in many organizations.

A lesson in flexibility

Consider the structure of a typical suburban school district. District headquarters houses the offices of the superintendent, the IT department and various support staff members. Each individual school has teachers, administrators and office staff. All of these employees need to be able to communicate effectively, whether they’re principals at different elementary schools, teachers across the district, administrative staff at the district offices or any of the other countless people that keep our educational institutions running.

Unified messaging makes it easy for all of these parties to remain in contact with one another, even though they work in different locations and only meet face to face on rare occasions. But that kind of flexibility doesn’t happen in a vacuum—you need the right technology to make it possible.

The answer key to remote working

A unified messaging solution allows you to keep remote employees connected without hurting collaboration or lowering productivity. It helps simplify the task of keeping your remote employees connected, no matter where they work. A unified communication system may include:

Voicemail boxes that are managed from a single interface on a unified system
Feature-rich phone systems that make it easier for employees to answer and route incoming calls
Collaboration platforms that enable employees to communicate through voice, messaging and teleconferencing tools
Call handling features like auto attendant
Additional message management features like fax and email

Unified messaging isn’t a communication platform in and of itself, but a solution that integrates into your larger communication platform. The goal is to provide remote workforces with advanced technology to stay connected in a single easy-to-use package.

The cheat sheet for unified messaging

If you’re a government, education or nonprofit organization, we know that you’re generally required to open an RFP to multiple providers when choosing a new communications platform. We also know the bidding process can be long and expensive. But there’s a way you can bypass the traditional RFP route and get a unified messaging system faster without skirting any regulatory requirements.

How? With the help of the National Joint Powers Alliance (NJPA). NJPA provides national contract volume pricing from nationally acclaimed vendors. As a partner with NJPA, Mitel is the exclusive provider of telecommunication solutions. This allows entities, like educational institutions, that must abide by legal and budgetary requirements to find the right unified messaging solution for their operations, without sacrificing quality and performance.

NJPA’s exclusive vendor contract with Mitel means that these organizations have access to these advanced technological solutions, without having to go through the traditional RFP process. The NJPA contract ensures competitive pricing that doesn’t jeopardize the tight budgets these groups operate within.

What’s available for educational institutions?

Towner Communication phone systems are available in several configurations, and each one is designed to suit the needs of different organizational structures. For example, MiVoice Embedded Messaging is an entry-level solution that offers voice and unified messaging for entities with fewer than 748 users. On the other hand, NuPoint Unified Messaging is a highly scalable, robust messaging solution that can be deployed physically (on-site) or virtually for organizations with as many as 120,000 users.

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February 16 2016

The Hybrid Cloud Is Your Communications Padlock

jtowner@townerkc.com Blog Business Communications, cloud, Cloud and Clear, mitel

Hybrid Cloud

Ask any CIO what they like about the cloud and you’ll get a variety answers: it’s simpler, it’s cheaper, it’s more efficient, it’s more scalable, etc. Ask them what they don’t like about the cloud and the answer is almost uniformly the same: security. Year after year, a perceived lack of security is the number one concern that keeps CIOs from fully investing in the “common” (i.e., public) cloud.

There are, of course, alternatives to putting everything into the public cloud. Many enterprises continue to use premises-based IT solutions as both a way to leverage their existing skill sets and maximize the ROI from their hardware/software investments. In fact, many enterprises have decided that a half-in/half-out approach to the cloud (frequently called a hybrid cloud) is the best strategy. But does a hybrid cloud represent a compromise between security and cost-efficiency, or can it actually enhance an enterprise’s security position?

5. Data security

Moving data from a private to a public network should naturally make a CIO nervous. Personally identifiable information like customer database records or credit card transactions are particularly sensitive, as compromised data can lead to lost customer trust and, ultimately, lost revenue. One of the advantages of a hybrid cloud is the ability to store highly sensitive data internally, but access it externally (and securely) via cloud-based applications. So long as secure access methods (VPN tunnels, authentication, encryption) are in place, a hybrid cloud can afford enterprises the best of both worlds in terms of data security and data mobility.

4. Industry compliance

Industry compliance requirements may look like alphabet soup to some—SOX, HIPAA, PCI—but enterprises need to follow them to the letter if they wish to protect their data and avoid hefty fines. This is why many hybrid cloud service providers make significant investments to ensure that their cloud platforms are industry compliant. As a result, businesses can find that a hybrid cloud solution actually gives them an advantage in terms of industry compliance without taking the burden on themselves.

3. Business continuity / Disaster recovery

This is one area where the cloud excels because of its natural redundancy and high availability. The benefit of deploying a hybrid cloud platform is the ability to back up internal applications and data in a separately maintained cloud to provide seamless disaster recovery and business continuity in the event of an internal network/hardware failure. Some hybrid clouds even offer geo-redundant servers so that no single point of failure exists in the cloud.

2. Network security

Any reputable hybrid cloud service will feature perimeter security (e.g., firewalls) to protect against unauthorized network entry. Some cloud providers, however, go beyond that to provide deeper levels of security through technologies like network virtualization and micro-segmentation that protect data and applications within the network as well. Here again, leveraging a cloud provider’s investments in security skills and technology can pay dividends to enterprises that may not have the same depth of skills and solutions in their own network.

1. Security control / Management

One of the common critiques against public cloud platforms is a perceived lack of control over security settings. Some hybrid cloud platforms address this issue by allowing their “tenants” to carry over security policies from their private cloud or internal data center to make security seamless between the public and private realms. In addition, hybrid cloud providers may offer a robust set of role-based security controls that allow IT administrators to tweak or change their security settings as needed.

Learn more about the cloud communications systems and on-premises communications systems that you can combine to create a hybrid cloud system >

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February 9 2016

NJPA vs. RFP

jtowner@townerkc.com Blog Business Communications, mitel, NJPA, Phone System, RFP, Towner Communications

If you work for a government, education or nonprofit agency, you can choose between two options when you’re ready to purchase a phone system—both of which will satisfy your bid requirements:

Request for Proposal (RFP)
National Joint Powers Alliance (NJPA)

Why do bid requirements exist?

Every publicly funded agency must put projects up for bid to provide companies with equal opportunity to win the agency’s business in a standardized format to try to ensure fairness. Agencies are also required to use the bidding process to document how they are spending the funds they’re being given. The most common method for doing this has traditionally been an RFP. But depending on your needs, an NJPA cooperative contract may be a better alternative.

The traditional RFP

The RFP process is designed to create an opportunity for companies to compete fairly for available work. Investopedia defines it this way:

A Request for Proposal for a specific program may require the company to review the bids to not only examine their feasibility, but also the health of the bidding company and the ability of the bidder to actually do what is proposed. The RFP may provide detailed information on the project or program, but can leave leeway for the bidder to fill in the blanks with how the project would be completed or program run.

Though this process was designed with good intentions, it can present some purchasing challenges for government, education and nonprofit agencies. In an article about the effectivenss of the RFP process, Brian Pullen of Playground, Inc. said this:

In principle, the RFP was created to solve a series of issues, with fairness, structure, clarity and distribution being primary among them. It was created to provide an equal opportunity to any company that wished to pitch […]. The process also creates a standardized structure for both creating the RFP and submitting proposals. The RFP was also created to bring clarity to the agencies pitching by making communication of the key requirements more organized upfront. Finally, by having a standardized document that contained all necessary information, it could be widely distributed allowing for many agencies to obtain it and pitch which would result in more options.

Read his full explanation of how RFPs can work against their purpose >

What kind of challenges do RFPs present to government, education and nonprofit agencies?

First, RFPs can limit the quality of responses you receive (not necessarily the quantity). Responding to RFPs is time consuming, so it can cause the following:

Best agencies choose not to respond
Businesses only respond if they see a significant benefit and/or high chances of winning the bid
Those that do respond put little energy into their proposal

Second, and more importantly, this process is very time consuming for agencies going out to bid. In a standard RFP process, each agency will go through the following steps:

Identify potential providers
Develop equipment and service specifications
Create and advertise RFP
Receive responses to RFP
Evaluate proposals
Award lowest bid
Offer a protest period
Have equipment delivered and installed
Review and maintain contract throughout its term

At minimum, we’ve found the RPF process takes three to six months, but usually ends up taking six to nine months from RFP build to installation. And even after all that, the way the RFP process is designed means there is no way to guarantee you will get the products or services that best suit your needs. Factors like cheap hardware and contract structuring that are barely related to your core needs may end up skewing the final decision.

The NJPA alternative

NJPA contracts eliminate these RFP challenges. They take the burden of RFPs off of government, education and nonprofit agencies. The NJPA conducts its own rigorous RFP process and awards a vendor a national contract. Since the RFP work is already done, agencies can purchase communication technology through an NJPA contract outright—saving months of time, word and uncertainty.

If you’re interested in a Towner Communications system, you’re in luck—the NJPA has awarded Mitel as its exclusive telecommunications vendor (that includes unified communications and phone systems).

The purchasing process and timeline is significantly reduced for government, education and nonprofit agencies using NJPA cooperative contracts. Instead of the time-consuming, nine-step process listed above, you only have to complete four steps:

Become a member of NJPA (if you aren’t already)
Get in contact with Towner Communications or Mitel to determine your specific phone system needs
Indicate that you want NJPA pricing and cut a purchase order
Have equipment delivered and installed

Not only are there fewer steps, but they take far less time and most of the heavy lifting is handled by Towner Communications or your Mitel partner (or the work1 has already been done by NJPA).

Common reservations about NJPA

For some, the benefits of the NJPA process may seem too good to be true. Here are some of the most common reservations we’ve heard, and the straight answers:

Reservation: Becoming a member of NJPA is difficult or expensive
The Truth: Membership is no-cost, no-obligation and no-liability for eligible agencies, including government, education or nonprofit agencies nationwide
Reservation: I’m not familiar with NJPA and don’t want to work with an unknown third party
The Truth: NJPA simply works in the background; the purchasing agency typically never communicates with NJPA
Reservation: The NJPA process won’t satisfy my bid requirement
The Truth: Yes, the NJPA contract can satisfy your bid requirements—we have all the documentation you’ll need

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