Hosiwell's Cat.5e Cabling Solutions for Volvo
Volvo
Hosiwell Cat.5e Cabling Solutions
24.7.2006
Volvo is one of the world’s largest producers of trucks, buses and construction equipment and holds a leading position in the fields of marine and industrial power systems and aircraft engine components. Since 1999, the Volvo Group has focused exclusively on transport equipment for commercial use.
Founded in 1927, Volvo today has 74,112 employees, production in 25 countries and operates in more than 185 markets. Volvo Truck & Bus embarked upon Project Harmony mid 1999 arising from the divestment of Volvo Cars to the Ford Motor Group.
Project Harmony represented the opportunity for all main administrative functions to be combined in a singleUKlocation.
The development involved the construction of a new office building on the Volvo Warwick site and the completed building became fully operational in late 2001. It links together the existingUKoffices with a new purpose-built facility which provides large floor plate office accommodation, training rooms, a purpose-built data centre and a truck service training bay.
The combined location now supports over 500 staff Birmingham based installer Amillan, was requested to tender for the Volvo IT Ltd (a division of The Volvo Group) structured cabling system requirement and with the help of Hosiwell, the partnership produced a solution, which met and surpassed Volvo IT’s stringent requirement.
Amillan was initially involved with the project at enquiry stage through Volvo’s IT consultants, Pagoda Consulting, who were responsible for the IT Infrastructure design and management of the tendering process on behalf of Volvo IT. Pagoda’s Philip Beale said “We were in search of an installer who would not only provide a one off installation to the site but were also reliable and would support the client in various moves and changes prior to the installation. In addition our client required a company that could also carry out various crucial changeover milestones for the project at different times”.
At evaluation stage of the tendering process Amillan was requested by the client and its consultants to provide a presentation of the benefits of using Amillan and the proposed Excel cabling solution.
At this stage Amillan felt it was crucial for the manufacturer and distributor themselves, Hosiwell, to present jointly to emphasise the benefits of the Excel cabling system and how Hosiwell would support Amillan in delivering a successful project. It was on the basis of this presentation that Amillan was awarded the project and that the Hosiwell cabling solution became the preferred cabling system for all elements of the project, namely Cat5e cabling, voice and fibre Amillan was also chosen to carry out the installation following a competitive tendering process and demonstrated a reputation of not only working with clients, consultants and builders as part of an overall project team but that they were very experienced with working in a building site environment.
The Hosiwell Category 5e structured cabling products were selected by Amillan and welcomed by Volvo IT due to their industry reputation of being reliable, cost effective and having an impressive product range. It was a simple task to reassure Volvo IT that they’d made the correct decision by revealing the number of Hosiwell installations that have taken place since its launch in 1997 plus the number of case studies which reiterate the customer satisfaction that Hosiwell assures.
The project consisted of the installation of 2700 category 5E outlets distributed across three floors of the Harmony building.
The environment presented raised floors with local cabling on each floor returning to one of two network nodes per floor.
Two of the floor areas were for general office use and the third floor consisted of the main computer room for the European headquarters, plus PC build and test area, workshops for R&D and various training rooms. The complex fibre backbone infrastructure, designed by Volvo IT and its consultants, is utilised for both voice and data services and has a design to link nine remote network node locations to the central comms room node.
One of the remote network nodes in a separate building was incorporated in the design as a disaster recovery location where a number of fibre cables were installed via diverse external routes to maximise resilience. A total of some 1200 cores of fibre were terminated using ST termination in the Excel range of patch panels and terminations plus a total of 780 copper Cat 5e backbone links were installed to patch voice and ISDN services to any location within the new building and existing building.
Within the main building the purpose designed comms room houses a total of 70 network enclosures comprising of custom design air cooling and condition dual resilient UPS power systems and an observer system to monitor all services within the room and provide notification of incidents. At the design stage it became apparent that some thirty plus networking enclosures would be required of varying sizes and configurations.
The client and consultants provided detailed drawings of the configuration for each cabinet and following a meeting involving the client, Hosiwell and Cooper B-Line (cabinet manufacturers), the detailed specification for all cabinets was derived. These cabinets were to be preconfigured and delivered to site ready for installation directly into the required locations.
Hosiwell’s pre-sales and logistics provided the assistance required for such a large delivery of custom designed cabinets at crucial delivery dates direct to the project as specified by Amillan. The structured cabling installed is utilised to its maximum for services such as voice, data, ISDN, BMS, gate entry systems, security and fault monitoring services.
The installation took place over a period of 3 months where various milestone time scales were set out by the client, consultants and the main contractor for completion.
Project management played a key role in the co-ordination of all the trades involved to ensure a smooth workflow without interference and meeting the crucial milestones set out for partial hand over dates. The end result is a successful project delivered on time with a happy client receiving, in all aspects, an installation that was accurate to a specific and detailed specification, designed some 12 months previously.
