SIG Case Study

SIG plc is a British-based international supplier of insulation, roofing, commercial interiors and specialist construction products, supplying trade customers across the UK, France, Germany, Poland, Ireland and Benelux. SIG has a strong heritage of specialist knowledge and expertise, and a wide and integrated network allowing them to work closely with their customers to meet their needs. SIG currently has 180 sites in the UK.

The Network Collective has been working with SIG since 2017 on a number of procurement and strategy projects across their telecommunications estate. As part of this work TNC provides an on-going billing management service to SIG to provide a unified view of their costs and continuing validation of invoicing and contract commitments. In the first three years of this engagement TNC identified in excess of £4m in savings across WAN, voice and mobility services. When this work began SIG had a large PSTN estate which was unwieldy, expensive, and outdated. SIG engaged with TNC to help migrate the majority of the legacy PSTN lines to SIP.

SIG wanted to move its legacy PSTN estate to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to get ahead of changes in the technology market. Already at TNC we are beginning to find that some suppliers will no longer accept orders for new PSTN lines. The process began with a complete site survey to understand the full complexity of SIG’s existing estate. TNC undertook a forensic examination of each line to identify its purpose and advised SIG to cease lines which were identified as no longer in use. As a result of this process SIG now has a full understanding of the voice estate and TNC can reconcile this information against billing as part of the ongoing billing management work.

TNC then managed the process with SIG’s voice supplier to move over 1000 lines of the retained PSTN estate to SIP, leaving only those lines connected to some alarms, ADSL and PDQ machines on PSTN. Once this transition was completed TNC monitored invoices to ensure that the billing was accurate and in-line with the new estate. This was a challenging period in which a fault in the billing process was identified by TNC, resulting in a large credit for historic transfers that had not been managed correctly.

As a result of moving the majority of the PSTN estate onto SIP, SIG now has a future-proof voice network with significant service improvements. Importantly, SIG was also able to realise substantial cost savings. There has been a reduction in monthly bills of approximately 55% since the work was commenced. TNC’s ongoing billing management work for SIG means that all billing continues to be checked and verified and SIG can be assured that their estate is well-managed and running efficiently.

SIG understood there were significant savings possible on our PSTN estate but lacked the resources to properly commit to the task. TNC provided a fantastic offer that enabled their experienced analysts to take ownership of the end-to-end Telephony audit process for us. Excellent knowledge and attention to detail have been delivered throughout and we’ve greatly appreciated the commitment and perseverance shown to achieve the savings we targeted. A great result!

Steve Barnett, Technical Architect – Networks & Voice at SIG

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