Christian Education Ministries

• ICT Manager, Christian Education Ministries
• New sites commissioned in a week, rather than three months rather than three months
• Enabling delivery of services with remote office and teaching staff
• Model to support rapid growth and optimised support

Christian Education Ministries (“CEM”) was established to support home schoolers in Australia, and has now expanded to operate 13 Australian Christian College schools, three SmartPlay childcare centres, distance education services and Australian Christian Home Schooling. With over 500 staff members educating and ministering to more than 6000 students, CEM provides back-office, IT and administrative shared services to its network of schools, ensuring each campus can operate more efficiently and cost-effectively.

CEM has grown rapidly, with a new school joining the Australian Christian College group every other year over the organisation’s 20-year history. A cloud-focused approach to IT has been a key enabler in CEM’s rapid growth.

Telephony a stumbling block

However, the group had been operating with a hosted IP telephony solution that was expensive and low on features, explained Craig Mckeown, ICT Manager, Christian Education Ministries.

“It was really difficult to manage, and there was no way for us to troubleshoot ourselves; for any issue we had to lodge a ticket with the service provider, but then nothing would be done about the problem anyway,” said Mckeown.

An additional problem was the complicated billing (typically running to more than 500 pages a month) where costs could fluctuate by up to four times the expected amount for each bill, with unexplained or inaccurate charges included.

“In five years, I don’t remember a bill being accurate,” said Mckeown.

To solve its telephony issues, CEM selected RingCentral’s RingEX cloud phone system after evaluating RingCentral along with a number of other cloud platforms.

“Cost-wise, system-wise and management-wise, RingCentral ticked all the boxes for us. They also provided a professional services team to help us configure and migrate to the new platform, and our existing Polycom handsets were supported by RingCentral, which meant we didn’t have any additional hardware costs,” said Byron Jeffery, Assisting ICT Manager, Christian Education Ministries.

The cutover to RingCentral was straightforward, with the solution integrated with Okta providing federated identity management and single sign-on for users.

The management of users and provisioning phones is now a lot easier and less complicated, said Jeffery. “If I need to move a phone number to a new user, I just need to change the email address.”

There was one issue where the ability for CEM’s in-house team to troubleshoot came to the fore. After experiencing poor quality of service (QoS) on some calls, CEM’s IT team analysed RingCentral Quality of Service Reports to determine the root cause. While the signal and call quality were good, and no packets were being lost, they quickly realised it was a handoff issue with a particular mobile service provider. After alerting RingCentral, the fault was quickly resolved.

“That’s something we would never have been able to do with our previous telephony provider,” said Mckeown.

Transforming education delivery

For each of its school campuses, CEM is able to run a very lean administration team. Having RingCentral gives the office staff greater mobility, enabling them to take the reception phone with them throughout the school or run the RingCentral app on their mobile phone, and comfortably perform multiple administrative roles during the day.

Most of CEM’s staff use the RingCentral soft client, with physical handsets in each classroom. That’s supporting CEM’s distance education services and a lot of its back office and teaching staff who are working remotely, with some based internationally.

The flexibility provided by RingCentral is transforming schools like ACC Southlands in Albany, a remote city at the southern tip of Western Australia, where the school supports a large group of distance education students . RingCentral has provided flexibility and enabled teaching staff who work remotely to receive and make calls, continuing to provide support to their students as if they were in the office.

“We couldn’t do that without RingCentral – our staff have been empowered by these solutions to work that way,” said Mckeown.

New site cutover in a week

The ease of management and agility of the new RingCentral platform was demonstrated when CEM brought on a new school – ACC Echuca in country Victoria – for the start of the 2024 school year. CEM connected the new campus to its national SD-WAN, contacted RingCentral to provision a new site, and configured handsets with MAC addresses.