Afren case study

Afren

Requirements

Linking of offices worldwide
Make savings on communications
High quality conferencing facility

Afren is an independent oil and gas exploration and production company that was founded in 2004. It has operations all around Africa from Nigeria to Congo, Gabon to Ghana. It also has corporate offices in London and Switzerland. In 2004 Afren became a Pinnacle client and had a 12 user system. In the subsequent 4 years they have grown and have moved offices in central London to accommodate for the 60 people they now employ.

When approaching Pinnacle they wanted to:

Link their London, Swiss and Nigerian offices to ease internal communications.
Reduce their international call costs.

Pinnacle linked all the Afren sites, using VoIP, enabling employees to free-call each other and significantly reducing the company’s total call costs and mobile roaming charges.

Afren commented “I can’t believe it is cheaper to call Nigeria than an UK mobile!....I would describe a phone call as business quality Skype”.

The new system grew with the company, which soon had remote workers all around the world. This meant that, wherever an employee was, they could log into the phone system and use their direct line, receive voicemail and receive calls made to their standard extension at their parent office. Using the Phone Manager software it was also possible for managers to see who was in the office and contactable, or if they were on the phone.

The, previously cumbersome, setting up of conference calling, was simplified. Pinnacle installed conference bridging, allowing an easy to use conferencing facility, which was quick and easy to set up and access and cut conferencing costs.

Pinnacle managed all the installations at all sites to ensure consistency and this meant that there was only one point of contact for the complete phone installation.

One call – answers!