Toyo/ENPPI (Engineering for the Petroleum & Process Industries) is a joint venture between Toyo, the Japanese engineering giant, and ENPPI, one of the middle east’s leading engineering organisations, to undertake two EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) projects to build a petrochemical plant in Egypt, valued at USD 1.10 billion.
ENPPI is recognized as an international engineering, EPC main and management contractor, with a proven record of accomplishments for both onshore and offshore projects. To date, more than 1100 projects with over 29 million Man-Hours of professional services have been completed for oil and gas, refining, petrochemical and general industry projects.
Challenge
As a joint venture, Toyo/ENPPI has to work with and consult teams in Egypt (Cairo and Alexandria), India (Mumbai) and Japan (Tokyo). In addition, the management and team at the joint venture also had to collaborate with several suppliers around the globe.
This made communication, both video and voice, essential and critical. The team was looking for a communications solution that provided efficient and stable communication between desktop and mobile devices but also reduce overall cost of these communications.
According to Mohammed Al-Desouky, IT Manager at Toyo/ENPPI JV, “Most of our services are cloud hosted. So we needed a solution that would optimise bandwidth use and enable our own VoIP systems to integrate with the new communications system and accept/send calls to mobile phones not just over the Internet but also on the GSM voice network.”
The team also needed a system that used SIP as well as H.323 for compatibility with existing units and VoIP systems in other locations.
Solution
After studying several alternatives, Toyo/ENPPI selected Polycom as a brand and worked with FVC’s Polycom authorised partner, Arkan, in Egypt to better understand their needs and suggest the solution that fitted their specific needs.
The organisation installed Polycom HDX7000 High definition (HD) Video Conferencing units in the Cairo office and another one in the Alexandria site office. Both units are registered and linked to the Toyo/ENPPI VoIP servers on each site to enable mobile phone dial-in/out, and both sites are connected via VPN. Both have NAT configuration to enable direct IP dial-in. Both units are placed behind a firewall with QoS for audio/video traffic.
Al-Desouky continued, “We picked Polycom as the most favourable brand that satisfies all our business and technical needs, and Arkan’s pre-sales team knew and understood our needs and provided the right solution for us to implement. I was given strong pre-sales and technical support from Arkan and FVC. It was important for me to have strong vender support with such a critical system.”
Implementation of the solution was carried out in two stages. Cairo Office completed approximately two years ago and the Alexandria Site office about one year ago. Implementation only took less than a day for hardware installation and initial configuration. Integration with VoIP took a couple of days for testing and optimization.
Results
According to Al-Desouky, the Polycom HDX Video Conferencing units provided the project team with the ability to communicate using half the bandwidth other brands needed for the same quality settings. This enabled Toyo/ENPPI to switch office Internet lease from SDSL to ADSL, which saved the company over 80% of its annual Internet cost.
“The new system has met all our goals, from establishing reliable and efficient video/audio conferencing communications to minimising our Internet costs,” added Al-Desouky. “The entire system is managed by one person on site at each office.”
In addition to saving 80% of its Internet cost, the team at Toyo/ENPPI also enjoy an indirect saving in the reduced man-hour loss in other non-visual communications like email and telephone.
