Adairs

Adairs commenced trading in Chapel Street, Prahran, Victoria in 1918 and then later became established as a mini department store stocking all lines in the drapery trade including manchester, curtains, ladies wear and haberdashery until 1980. In 1981 the first of today's chain was opened in Doncaster Shoppingtown and in 1984 stores at Brandon Park, Chadstone, Frankston and Northland were added. Adairs is now the largest national specialty manchester retailer and has expanded considerably since 1984. Our stores are generally located in major regional shopping centres in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory. Adairs were looking for a new PBX solution in mid 2004. Adairs had implemented an ADSL VPN across all of our sites, so an IP-based system would allow all of our stores to have phones attached to our main Asterisk PBX. We chose to test the Asterisk Solution as we had an urgent need to start supporting our 1300 IT Support number internally. We decided that this would make a great testbed for the Asterisk system, and give the IT Staff time to learn the system and decide whether it was best fit for the company. After 1 month of testing the system internally, we were happy that the system would be able to provide the functionality needed by the Adairs Company, and provide many new features that our current PBX system did not.

Late 2004

• We bought a new server and a Digium E1 card.
• G729 was chosen for the Store phones, and G711 for Head Office.
• We had an E1 line (20 lines) installed by AAPT.
• We bought, configured and installed 70 phones (one for each site)
• We installed 40 phones in our Head Office.

Overall, the first stage of the project was a success. There was some staff resistance to the new system, but it was minimal. We now had all of our stores hooked up to the Head Office Asterisk PBX. We had reporting on all calls. We could program the system to handle calls in many ways, with only a minimal amount of effort.

Early 2005

• We sent out extra phones to our larger sites (so that larger stores had at least 2 IP phones)
• We installed a digital fixed-to-mobile gateway
• We started using ATP's servers to handle our outgoing calls to Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide numbers. (Our HO is in Melbourne) Overall, the project has been a tremendous success.

We replaced our aging PBX with a new Asterisk system for a very reasonable cost. We gained a tremendous range of new features. We could now run, service and program our Asterisk PBX ourselves. We reduced our monthly phone bills by 50%.