Adient

Putting Adient in the Driver’s Seat of Their UC Innovation With Continuant Managed Services

Headquarters

Dublin, Ireland

Industry

Manufacturing

Locations

250 locations, 30+ countries

Employees

~ 85,000

Background Challenge/Solution Outlook Next Steps

The background

For the company known today as Adient—whose name derives from the Latin word meaning “accepting and advancing a situation”—moving toward and past challenges is nothing new.

Adient leads the charge to produce safer, lighter, and more ergonomic seating for the global auto industry, supplying some 25 million seating systems yearly to 360 vehicle nameplates worldwide.

Buckle up for this fact: 52% of all automobile seats throughout the world are manufactured in an Adient plant.

When Adient felt it was time to move forward with unifying communications, it needed to find a partner who shared its eye for innovation to chart its map to the future.

The solution

Continuant helped Adient overcome many challenges. Continuant replaced Adient’s Avaya system with Microsoft Phone System and helped Adient migrate 20,000 users, ensuring that they’d be able to get the most out of their new solution. The new hardware for the solution, such as phones, gateways, and headsets, was provided as a service, saving Adient money and cutting down on hassle.

Hardware as a Service makes life much easier for businesses like Adient, removing the difficulties that would normally come with on-prem equipment. As an operational expense, it’s also much easier to finance than a capital expense would be, requiring recurring payment rather than payment upfront.

Along with the Microsoft solution, Continuant installed the Five9 contact center application. An omnichannel, 100% cloud-based contact center solution, Five9 serves as an excellent upgrade for any of its on-prem counterparts. It excels at connecting the right agents and clients at the right time.

This contact center is a critical part of the collaboration solution, as it helps employees from all over the world connect to its internal help desk and Human Resources. It ensures that no matter where they are, Adient’s employees can receive immediate attention for any HR-related issues.

Continuant is providing ongoing Managed Services to Adient’s Microsoft solution and its Five9 contact center, including Incident Management, Problem Management, Preventative Maintenance, Carrier Services, Configuration Management, Change Management, Asset Management, Release Management and Documentation Management.

Furthermore, Continuant supports Adient’s users all over the world, including countries such as Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Mexico, Morocco, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, the UK, and the USA.

The challenge

Adient eventually looked to replace its hosted Avaya solution. As far as Unified Communications was concerned, Adient worried about the long-term viability of its legacy solution. What this organization wanted more than anything was a single UC solution that would cover all the modalities:

messaging
presence
voice
mobility
conferencing
collaboration

In other words, Adient wanted a solution that could cover everything from text chat to video calls as efficiently as possible.

The outlook

Now that the first 20,000 Microsoft users have been installed and the Avaya system has all been replaced, Adient and Continuant are making plans to move even more users to the Microsoft solution. Since the initial deployment, Adient’s Microsoft usage has increased elevenfold, and that number will only keep going up.

Adient and Continuant are also in discussions about how Continuant can help with the deployment and ongoing management of Microsoft Meeting Rooms solutions (including AV design services, integration, and managed services). There’s always more to be done for this forward-thinking company.

Let’s develop a powerful business case for bringing Continuant to your organization.