discussUC

Authors: Nadee Gunasena

Authors: Kirk Gregersen

Microsoft News Center posted a piece yesterday featuring research from The World Wildlife Fund that calls out the benefit that increased telecommuting and virtual meetings could have on the environment.

With today being Earth Day, I wanted to take a few minutes to write about the various options that companies and workers...

Authors: Julia White

Severstal is one of Russia’s largest steel and mining companies.  With 92,000 employees in 10 countries, Severstal had been on Lotus Notes since 2003.  But as the company grew rapidly, Severstal was finding that it was difficult to integrate Notes with

Pleased to provide a well done piece on Avaya’s Design for Environment work, which comprises processes and checklists that ensure our products are complaint with regulations around the world and are designed in a way to minimize waste and maximize efficiency throughout the entire life cycle. Trevor outlines the work he undertook to reduce the paint used on our 9600 phones, which resulted in removing the paint entirely from the phones, a significant savings and environmental benefit.

Design for Environment (DFE) in Practice
Trevor Aggus

Avaya has been a leader in environmentally responsible design practices for many years. As part of our design process, we adhere to Design for Environment (DFE) checklists. One DFE checklist is specifically for the design of plastic parts. This checklist includes guidelines and recommendations on how to minimize plastic waste and maximize recyclability of plastic parts. One recommendation is to minimize the amount of paint used on plastic parts. Paint on plastic can create problems when trying to recycle the parts, so painting plastic is avoided whenever possible.

The 9600 line of phones are Avaya's high end IP phones. Customers expect these phones to be the highest quality product in both functionality and appearance. The plastic housings and faceplates on the 9600 phones are a dark charcoal color. This dark color is aesthetically pleasing, but has a tendency to show cosmetic molding imperfections in the plastic. This is particularly true on thin plastic parts such as the faceplates. In the early stages of the design, numerous attempts were made to improve the aesthetics of the faceplates. Significant improvements were made, but the quality was still not high enough for the 9600 phones. This resulted in the need to paint the faceplates. This is a common practice in the plastics industry for aesthetically critical parts. A very light coat of same color paint is applied to the plastic to hide cosmetic imperfections.

The team responsible for the 9600 plastic was never totally satisfied with the painting solution, and continued to investigate methods to eliminate the painting process. The cosmetic imperfections are caused by the rapid cooling of the molten plastic as it flows into the cooler mold (tool). Recent advances in tool design and processing have addressed this problem by rapidly heating and cooling the tool with steam and cooling water. Avaya took advantage of this new process for the faceplates on the 9620L and 9620C. These are the highest volume models of the 9600 phones. The results were excellent. The cosmetic quality of the new unpainted faceplates matches the painted faceplates. The new unpainted faceplates will be phased into production over the next few months.

This is an example of a going green initiative that also makes good business sense. Not only are the plastic faceplates easier to recycle, but the additional cost of painting has been eliminated. Based on the excellent results from this new molding process on the 9600 phones, the next generation of Avaya phones are currently being designed without the need for painted faceplates. Avaya sells millions of phones every year that will need to be recycled at some time in the future. The elimination of paint and improved recyclability of these phones is a significant step forward for Avaya's going green initiative.

Authors: Avaya Insights

Tomorrow, Avaya's CEO Kevin Kennedy will give a keynote at Enterprise Connect. He will most assuredly be speaking about the many innovative and cool solutions and products that Avaya has brought to the market in the last year, products such as the Avaya Flare™ Experience (up for Best of award for the conference, by the way) ...

Authors: Avaya Insights

In a recent edition of The Wall Street Journal, Ellen Gamerman published a piece called Animation Nation, referring to do-it yourself animation as the latest form of individual, on-line self-expression. So, what about the use of animation in the business environment....real-time animation, to enable you to host or attend a...