Success Story
Stora Enso International1
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Bioeconomy and Voice over IP:
UNICOPE Mobile Landline for Stora Enso International
“Right from the very first conversation, UNICOPE impressed me with their expertise and quickly demonstrated the benefits of a cloud-based telephony solution. Since the project implementation, we have not only saved on service and maintenance costs but also valuable resources, as we no longer need to manage any telephony hardware.”
Andreas Höbarth, IT Manager, Stora Enso Wood Products
Stora Enso is a Finnish-Swedish corporation and the second-largest forest company in the world in terms of production capacity. As part of the global bioeconomy, Stora Enso is a leading provider of sustainable products in the packaging, biomaterials, wooden construction, and paper sectors, as well as one of the largest private forest owners. In 2018, Andreas Höbarth, the responsible IT manager of Stora Enso Wood Products, decided to transition to cloud-based IT telephony and collaborate with UNICOPE.
The project started in Germany, where the impending shutdown of ISDN lines had already been announced by the legislature in 2019. After a several-month proof of concept at the Mönchengladbach location with 40 extensions, UNICOPE Mobile Landline convinced Stora Enso. Migration and productive launch took place within just three days in Mönchengladbach and Düsseldorf in early 2019. In September 2019, UNICOPE continued the implementation at the Zdirec and Plana locations in the Czech Republic. In Austria, UNICOPE successfully preconfigured the system remotely in March 2020, as on-site installation was not possible during the initial lockdown phase of the pandemic. Following a successful go-live at the pilot site in Brand (Lower Austria), the remaining production sites in Ybbs (Lower Austria) and Bad St. Leonhart (Carinthia) were gradually implemented.
Products and Services Used
Telephony was decoupled from data traffic with a dedicated firewall maintained and monitored by UNICOPE, providing security. Only about 5% of landline connections still require a physical telephone device. Adding or removing extensions can be done flexibly at any time. Moving extensions during a change of workspace no longer poses any effort. Through the use of softphone applications, employees, especially those without a company mobile phone, have no limitations when working from home. They can be reached at their landline extension on their PC workstation at home through the app. This significantly facilitates the “hybrid work model” that emerged at Stora Enso due to the pandemic. Even during international business trips, calls can be made at domestic rates using the soft client.
Making calls no longer requires entering phone numbers but simply clicking on the contact in the global address directory. Call handling can be centrally managed from reception desks at any location. The status and availability of all employees are clearly visible. This is particularly relevant for the Stora Enso IT Service Desk and IT on-call service, as it displays the availability of the respective teams in operation.
During the early phase of the project implementation, UNICOPE demonstrated its programming competence. Prior to the introduction of MS Teams, when Stora Enso employees were still using Skype for Business for telephony, their telephone status was not displayed in the app, which did not signal to the caller that they were currently engaged in a call. This problem was resolved through a custom development by the UNICOPE team. The billing mode was also adjusted to Stora Enso’s specific requirements, including quarterly individual call statements.
