Yo!Sushi going all IP

Purveyor of conveyor-belt Japanese cuisine Yo!Sushi will soon complete an IP telephony rollout across its entire estate, consigning the troubles of maintaining an ageing PBX to the past and slashing its BT phone bills.

Yo!Sushi IT manager, Billy Walters, told silicon.com: "A couple of years ago our existing telephone system - which was a standard PBX - was beginning to cause problems. Maintenance was getting difficult and it was coming to the end of its life. And we had to do something."

The company looked at two IP telephony offerings - one from Avaya and one from Swyx - and settled on Swyx's system which is based on software licences, rather than hardware, and which offered the company a cheaper way to deploy IP telephony, according to Walters.

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"All it means is we run our telephone system off a server and when we want to add more users it's a case of buying handsets and licences - there's no central server or switchboard hardware required," he said.

Walters added: "It's easier for us. We're limited by space and limited by in-house resources to implement hardware solutions. When we just have to add a couple more licences on, it's a lot easier and a lot less time-consuming for us. There's no planning required - if we suddenly decide we're going to take five more people on at head office we can have them on straight away really."

Yo!Sushi's head office got the system some 18 months ago and Walters said the company will complete the upgrade of its 35 restaurants in four to eight weeks. "We're probably about three-quarters of the way there at the moment," he added.

As well as eradicating PBX maintenance issues, IP telephony has enabled the company to make big cost savings, according to Walters. "We're probably going to be able to get rid of in the region of at least 60 standard BT lines - and if you think they rent at £11.60 a month before you even get anywhere… Really for us we didn't go any further than looking at that. That was 'ok, that covers our costs'."

Cost savings are also made on calls, said Walters, as the system means calls between head office and the restaurants will be free.

And there are time-savings too, Walters said: "It's one point of contact… Before we did this we didn't have the whole estate on one telephone line. You had head office using the standard PBX, and all our restaurants were just at the end of a standard BT line with a phone plugged in. Now you've unified the whole estate and you've taken out the millions of different things that can go wrong - with just one point of contact if there's an issue."

Walters added that switching to IP telephony has enabled Yo!Sushi to in-source a call centre for its home delivery service, creating some six to 10 jobs in the process.

He said: "The main benefits are obviously there's a cost saving over using a conventional outsourced call centre but also the people that work there have a knowledge of our products...Our people work for Yo!Sushi, they go through a Yo!Sushi induction. They eat the food, they see the food everyday."

In the future, he said the company is looking to deploy SwyxMobile - which will push out the IP telephony functionality to Yo!Sushi's mobile users. However, it's awaiting a software upgrade to make the system compatible with the BlackBerry smart phones it uses.

He explains: "We have quite a lot of people on the road. It just cuts it down, so you've only got one number - you haven't got a mobile number and a landline number. One of the great things of the Swyx system is you can see the presence of people - you can see whether they're available for a call, whether they're on an existing call, whether they're not logged on. And that functionality will be available to mobile users and other users looking at mobile users."