VMCH provides early learning and therapy, specialist education, disability services, affordable homes, residential aged care, retirement living and at-home aged care to more than 7,600 people across Victoria.

VMCH Merging two different IT Systems was a major challenge for Andrew Van de Ven VMCH Information Technology Manager. The challenge to implement a new fleet of MFDs and managed print services if done right could bring significant benefits to the organisation.

VMCH went to market for a managed print solution which had to have excellent FAX integration without the need for phone lines attached to each MFD.

The Challenge
With the rollout of NBN, Telstra services such as ISDN were being disconnected forcing customers to change their telephony mix. Health care providers use facsimile extensively for health care information. VMCH send over 20,000 multi-page faxes per annum and receive around 9000 multi-page faxes per annum.

Essentially, the challenge was how to provide secure fax communications to the PSTN with no images stored at a service provider and no phone lines on-premises.

The Solution
Ricoh Australia and BNS had worked for many years perfecting a solution that delivered everything required by VMCH. Ricoh’s FAX application which integrated with BNS’s fax server was the perfect fit for VMCH to send and print faxes from MFDs without phone lines.

Ricoh won the business, deployed the solution with BNS and Comvergence (SIP telephony services) based out of Melbourne.

Anticipating the needs of customers like VMCH, BNS had already teamed up with Comvergence, a national telephony service provider based out of Melbourne.

Comvergence provided a secure IP\SEC tunnel between its network and the VMCH data centre.

BNS’s fax server securely delivers fax images from to on-premises email servers or Office 365 using transport layer security (TLS).

No fax images are stored outside of VMCH’s network. Comvergence provide only a SIP to PSTN switched voice call within their network. Click here to view FAX Datasheet.

Business Benefits
VMCH was able to implement a new fleet of MFDs supporting fax without phone lines. This was crucial for VMCH and one of the reasons VMCH chose Ricoh.

Privacy of health data is maintained whilst taking advantage of using hosted telephony switching to the PSTN. VMCH had no dedicated fax phones line to deal with anymore but had security in the design.

Over 50 analog Telstra phone lines were decommissioned ahead of the scheduled Telstra disconnection. Total cost of ownership was dramatically reduced with the solution.