Success Stories

The Whole Story 

Grow the communityAs well as occupying a huge space within Sheffield city centre, Heeley City Farm has 14 other sites across the city including the South Yorkshire Energy Centre and struggled to keep them all connected. They also had serious internal issues with their telephony; they could go days (even a whole week!) without internet access.  The more downtime, the less effective they become and as a community based provider. They needed a robust & reliable solution that was above all, cost effective, to help the farm continue to grow and maximise the opportunity for investment & funding.

Remote Faster EfficiencyWorking remotely using

virtual networksBroadband speed more

than trebledIncreased ability to

communicate across sites

Their Story  

Putting down rootsHeeley City Farm is a city farm, founded in 1981, in Heeley, Sheffield. It is a community-based and led training, employment and youth enterprise. Heeley City Farm maintains a much needed green space in inner suburban Sheffield with recycling, healthy living facilities, a garden centre, cafe, and charity shop. Day care and training for up to 20 adults with learning difficulties is provided along with vocational training in horticulture for up to 100 unemployed adults, youth activities for up to 2,000 young people and support for over 100 regular volunteers. Income comes mostly from social enterprise activity including public sector service contracts, enterprise sales and consultancy services. In 2005, less than 25% of income was described as funding but this included charitable funding and grants for specific projects or activities.

Their Goal 

Making hay To continue their growth & support for all of the community. The more awareness that can be generated about the fantastic work they are doing the better. There communication outwardly to their partners & visitors is critical to their plans for future growth & funding opportunities  They also want to continue to engage with the local community to promote the benefits of locally produced sustainable food and foster a greater sense of community through mutually beneficial agriculture. Help and support from the business community too is needed to enable them to fulfil some of the building & improvement works and allow them to start to really function as a self-sufficient business.

“It was a daily battle between us and the internet. Unfortunately we weren’t winning. Solution came along

and started to help us make some headway. We can now make free calls between sites and our stability issues have nearly been fully resolved. As SolCom

continues its development it’s proving an increasingly useful tool helps provides us with the capability to

connect between all our various sites” Sam Bennett, Finance, HR & Monitoring Manager,

Heeley City Farm

Their SolutionWe installed a standard PBX based telephone system in 2009 before introducing a SolCom in 2013. First and foremost for SolCom’s reliability; over 90% of system faults that do occur are identified and fixed before they are aware that they exist.

Then there is the smarter advances; the free calls between sites is a valuable saving, any voicemails that are left can be picked up securely by any authorised individual from any location and there is also the benefit of having these voicemails emailed to you should you be out of the office for a considerable amount of time. The IVR helps to route calls to the correct place saving valuable staff time transferring calls between extensions.  If the worst happens and a component of the SolCom system breaks – SolCare+ is in place to react & fix the issue within 8 hours but with resilience and dual clusters built into the platform the calls are not lost!!

Their Success Heeley City Farm achieved the following since the induction of SolCom: Significant increases in internet speed &

bandwidth Free calls between sites Increased stability More efficient call routing using IVR