The Century Group

Century Print is a long-established print and design company, based in Penryn. Employing 86 people, Century Print was one of the very first to sign up to ADSL broadband when it became available through the Penryn exchange in 2004.

Terry Carlin, IT Manager, says 'Broadband and flexible working have completely changed the way we run our business, increasing productivity and bringing significant savings in both time and money. It means that most of our work now comes into us over the Internet and we also use an online proofing system, so that clients can check proofs on screen -rather than waiting for hard copy through the mail.

'As we have clients throughout the UK and in the United States, this makes a huge difference. It effectively means that we can work in Cornwall and yet service clients anywhere in the world.'

Because of their high bandwidth needs, Century have four lines bonded together.

Broadband has recently opened up new ways of flexible working for the company. Terry says ' All our salesmen now have PCs at home from which they link into our Virtual Private Network through remote computer access. This allows them to reduce travel s,aves them unnecessary travel to and from the office and brings increasing productivity. . They can also carry out mobile working from wireless hotspots when they are out on the road, which means that clients and prospective clients get speedier response times, making it more likely that we win contracts. We now regard flexible working and mobile working as a crucial part of keeping our business ahead.'

The company has always pioneered new frontiers in IT. Century was the first printer in the UK to print a magazine with wholly client supplied PDFs and the first printer in the UK to have a FTP server to receive files supplied direct from clients.

Continuing this tradition of innovation, Century is now the first printing company South West of Bristol to run VoIP telephony (voice over internet) through their own Asterisk based PBX 'virtual' switchboard.

The new system was set up in April 2007 and already the company are experiencing the benefits.

Terry says ' The whole system, which provides 33 internal phones and our own switchboard with a full range of functions, cost under £2500. This is less than a third of what we were quoted for a new conventional telephone system with equivalent functionality.

'In addition to the savings on the set up costs, we expect to save at least 20% on the cost of our calls. The system we have chosen is a state of the art digital switchboard with web based interface and the latest phones. We did also look at an option of PC based 'soft phones' but we decided that hardware Internet phones would be more robust and suit our needs better.

Terry continues ' One of the most exciting aspects of broadband is the way it opens up new horizons through new applications. VoIP is now set to revolutionise our telephony, increasing our efficiency, reducing our costs and enhancing the experience of our clients.

'As well as saving us money, it enables us to do much more than our old system. For example, it no longer matters where someone is flexible working or mobile working  - home, office or on the road, the right phone will always ring for them in the right location! For example, my MD works from home a lot and is mobile working on the road as well. So when someone dials his extension, a phone rings both in his office and at his home office. If there is no answer there, it diverts to his mobile.

Our new system also allows the phone speakers to double as an intercom system, which is really useful when we are trying to contact managers who could be anywhere in a huge factory.'

'Broadband has already transformed the way we run our business through bringing us benefits of speed and bandwidth, but the new applications that it is now enabling - in particular VoIP and the advantages of flexible working - are taking us into a whole new era.'

www.centuryprint.com