Background

The Stanlow refinery located in Cheshire is one of the biggest refineries in the UK (770ha site). The refinery’s output meets approximately 16% of the country’s road transport fuels demand. Owned and operated by Essar Oil (UK), the Stanlow refinery has the capacity to process up to 10 million tonnes (Mt) of crude oil a year.

The Problem

Vodafone own and manage the iSDX (HiPath DX) estate for Essar Oil at the Ellesmere Port oil refinery. The system consists of three HiPath DX’s networked using the DPNSS feature set. There is a total of approximately 2000+ telephone handsets covering the three sites.

Vodafone tried to upgrade the PBX’s in 2017 and were informed that only revision 8 software and above was eligible for upgrade. In 2022.

The Solution

Ellesmere engaged with Telecom Resource, who informed them that HiPath upgrades were available and carried out the work. The scope of the work was to upgrade the PBX’s to revision 15 software and install a DX-Mail (voicemail) service.

The two smaller sites (HiPath DX) were already running revision 11 software and therefore the transition to revision 15 was straight forward. However, the large iSDX-L at Stanlow Refinery required a complete change of hardware of the telephony and CPU’s shelves. The Telecom Resource team resourced new hardware and software and carried out the upgrade with minimal downtime. Telecom Resource’s preparation work was key to a smooth transition.

Vodafone were keen to upgrade the telephony estate for the following reasons:

• Extend the life of the HiPath DX as their IP telephony solution didn’t meet the requirements of their large number of analogue handsets.
• The leased line circuits connecting the PBX’s are going end of life in 2025. We are currently installing IP trunking to replace the leased line circuits (DPNSS).
• A break/fix support contract with manufacturer support.

The Result

“Don and his team were a pleasure to work with and they made every effort to keep the upgrade downtime to a minimum. This was important to Essar Oil due to the nature of the site and the large amount of telephones designated for health and safety purposes.”

Mike Irvine Engineering Authority , Voice Service Support