A modern, centralised telephone and alarm solution tailored to the needs of the homes

The municipality of Schaffhausen offers its residents a wide range of care services, along with social support and household assistance (laundry, cleaning, meals). Bouygues Energies & Services was hired to perform various tasks. One of these involved replacing the outdated telephone systems with a modern, centralised solution.

As part of the modernisation project, a range of complex requirements had to be met:

• The individual telephony installations at the assisted living and care homes had to be replaced and centralised into a single system
• A mobile phone solution had to be integrated for the carers/nurses, administrative and technical service staff using DECT technology
• Alarms had to be introduced via a central alarm server, which included connecting the existing nurse call systems from GETS and Johnson Controls (TYCO)
• Preparations had to be made to integrate all the building services alarms
• Residents needed to be able to check in and out easily using a hotel-style application
• All systems were to be operated by the technical service using central administration platforms

In addition, the solution needed to offer high availability and stability so that the telephone system would be fail-proof at all sites.

A central, redundant call server connected to the public telephone network was implemented in order to reduce maintenance costs while simultaneously making everything more fail-proof. The centralised architecture incorporates all critical components of this communications platform. For the staff at the assisted living and care homes, the unified communication client offers a convenient way of working from home or on the go. They are now able to communicate using DECT equipment, IP and digital terminals, and the Rainbow UCC application. The residents’ telephones take the form of analogue terminals. The entire communications solution is regularly updated to ensure that the customer always has updated infrastructure at their command. Extensions to the communications solution can be implemented quickly and easily. The project also involved putting the MultiTech solution in place, and as part of this, Bouygues Energies & Services also had to expand the server technology and make some necessary adjustments to the building infrastructure.

Telephony platform: Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise

Alarm server platform: Novalink mit NovaAlert

Unified communication platform: Alcatel-Lucent Rainbow

Hotel-style application: AlwinPro Care

Pascal Sigg, Managing Director of sigg elektroplanung gmbh, was extremely satisfied with how the project was carried out and implemented in collaboration with Bouygues Energies & Services in Switzerland. The potential synergies between the various care homes operated by the municipality of Schaffhausen were fully leveraged, with all stakeholders regarding the project as a huge success.