ShoreTel in Manufacturing

Beating communications complexity. MANUFACTURING

2 | BEATING COMPLEXITY: Manufacturing

ShoreTel in manufacturing

• Scalability: Dealing with distributed offices and numerous remote plants? ShoreTel helps you unify communications between all your sites—including integration with legacy systems—so you can ensure continued growth that leverages existing assets without costly production delays.

• Availability and reliability: With more than 99.999 percent (five nines) availability and IP phone failover, ShoreTel ensures reliable communications throughout the entire value chain, helping to avoid production and distribution disruptions and speed time to market.

• Ease of use and management: Through advanced call-routing features and centralized management across the system, ShoreTel helps reduce costly operational headaches, while ensuring high levels of user adoption and complete customer satisfaction.

“ShoreTel’s low total cost of ownership clearly demonstrated that ShoreTel was the best investment to meet our requirements.”

— JIM LYLE, Communications Administrator Ready Pac

Overview

In today’s dynamic global economy, manufacturers are under mounting pressure to compete while margins shrink. Aggressive pricing and more demanding customers are forcing many manufacturing companies to refocus business processes and systems with an eye on efficiency and reliability. Among the most vital of those systems is communications. When a company’s value chain encompasses an ever-increasing number of factory sites, distributors, and retailers, phone communications between each point become inextricably linked to employee productivity, time-to-market, and even revenue.

No matter what type of product they deliver, manufacturing enterprises need to ensure that workers can reliably contact one another with speed and ease, regardless of their locations. Likewise, corporate expansion must be a smooth and efficient process for those managing communications systems. Even a small glitch or missing feature can contribute to costly delays or shutdowns, which in turn hurt both the bottom line and the company’s reputation.

Fortunately, ShoreTel provides a brilliantly simple solution for manufacturing organizations. Our unified communications (UC) system provides the rich feature set, reliability, and low total cost of ownership that manufacturing companies need to function, serve, and succeed:

•Scalability: ShoreTel makes it simple to deploy and manage communications between numerous offices and plants, while ensuring quick system growth as you expand.

• Reliability and high availability: ShoreTel provides exceptional reliability, helping to eliminate distribution delays and empowering workers to be more productive.

• Ease of use and management: ShoreTel’s centralized system management and powerful features do not require special skills and certifications so your IT team have more time and resources to focus on core business projects.

The ShoreTel UC system helps manufacturers leverage these benefits to transform communications throughout the product lifecycle chain, resulting in the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) in the industry and the highest customer satisfaction levels.

ShoreTel customers: manufacturing

• Grande Cache Coal

• Schratter Foods

• Markem-Imaje

• Ready Pac

• JT Packard

• Down Lite International

• Liberty Hardware Manufacturing Corporation

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• NORPAC Foods

• Quaker Fabric

• IIMAK

• Woods Equipment Company

• Warn Industries

• OFS Optics

4 | BEATING COMPLEXITY: Manufacturing

ShoreTel Instant communications throughout the supply chain

The ShoreTel IP phone system is based on a distributed architecture that ensures no single point of failure. Setup is intuitive and straightforward: Call control is distributed to intelligent gateways known as voice switches, and ShoreTel voice applications —including voicemail and automated attendant—run on standard server hardware from anywhere on your IP network.

The ShoreTel distributed architecture incorporates a switch-based hardware platform that is managed centrally through our intuitive Web-based interface, ShoreTel Director. Each switch and site works like an independent call processor and continues to operate seamlessly in the event of wide area network (WAN) failure. Unlike other solutions, all servers can be disconnected from the ShoreTel switches and the ShoreTel phone system continues to place and receive calls.

The ShoreTel distributed architecture

PSTN/ITSP

PSTN

SINGLE-IMAGE ARCHITECTURE

PSTN/ITSP

IP WAN

ShoreTel VPN Phone

Legacy PBX

ShoreTel Voice Switch

Legacy Voicemail

Legacy Phones

ShoreTel Voice Switches

ShoreTel Communicator

ShoreTel IP Phone

Distributed Voice Server (voicemail & auto attendant)[Physical or Virtual]

Contact Center

ShoreTel Communicator

ShoreTel Communicator

Analog Device

ShoreTel Voice Switches

ShoreTel IP Phone

ShoreTel Appliances (Collaboration,

VPN Concentrator,& Mobility Router)

ShoreTel Director

Headquarters Server(System Adminstration, voicemail,

auto attendant, work groups)[Physical or Virtual]

Contact Center

INTERNATIONAL BRANCH

OFFICE ANYWHERE

REGIONAL OFFICE

HEADQUARTERS

SINGLE-IMAGE ARCHITECTURE

ShoreTel Communicator &RoamAnywhere

ShoreTel Communicator &RoamAnywhere

ShoreTel Communicator &RoamAnywhere

ShoreTel Communicator &RoamAnywhere

Scalability

Manufacturing companies are constantly expanding into new geographies and growing their distribution networks to stay competitive. While they achieve this growth, however, they frequently face budget constraints that prevent them from reinventing technology infrastructure across the board. Often, new locations need to continue deploying applications and platforms already in place at existing sites—and they need to know that their ability to communicate between sites isn’t slowed down by these legacy systems. After all, growth is about building potential—not stunting it.

ShoreTel’s distributed architecture lets you connect your many facilities with a unified corporate brand, even as you scale to add new employees, offices, and regions. Here’s how we do it:

• With ShoreTel Director and our distributed, switch-based architecture, you get fast plug-and-play deployment, so you can easily add thousands of phone lines and even more users—without facing connection limitations.

• No matter how many sites you add or where they are located, employees can still use 4-digit dialing or dial-by-name right from the desktop to reach any colleague at any site.

• External callers to the system simply dial one number, and the automated attendant directs them to the right place.

• ShoreTel facilitates legacy system integration as well. In addition to phasing in with your existing phone system for faster rollout, we also integrate with other critical communications applications, so you can remain connected to vital calendar and contact details.

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Availability and reliability

Many manufacturing companies have facilities strewn across numerous countries—even in very remote areas. If communications fail between primary offices and more remote sites for any reason, companies can face costly delays or even total shutdowns. Obviously, these types of breaks in the value chain can result in needless expenses or more devastating business consequences, including losses in partner, distributor, and customer relationships.

The ShoreTel UC system has no single point of failure, even across multiple sites, and offers enterprise-class high availability. Here’s how we support your need for consistent uptime and performance:

•Through distributed call control and N+1 failover, ShoreTel delivers simple, cost-effective reliability. A single ShoreTel Voice Switch can provide backup to any number (N) of other switches. In the unlikely case of a ShoreTel switch failure, phones automatically failover to another voice switch, providing your company with complete redundancy no matter how many lines you are running.

• Our switches are highly reliable and have no moving parts (except for a fan), redundant Ethernet ports, and a real-time operating system.

• ShoreTel’s distributed architecture automatically responds to and works around LAN, WAN or PSTN failures to provide nonstop phone operation, so you can always respond quickly and effectively to any urgent requests or unexpected emergencies.

Ease of use and ease of management

By virtue of their industry, manufacturing companies rely on technology to streamline business operations and facilitate business processes. IT and other system administrators in these businesses don’t have the resources or inclination to manage complex communication systems. They need to remain attentive to regular business operations that drive value for the organization, and they need a communications platform that not only requires minimal support but also empowers them to become more productive.

The ShoreTel system is designed to dramatically simplify communications management and increase productivity for users and administrators without demanding lengthy training sessions. Here’s how we cut complexity and drive down the associated costs:

• Brilliantly simple ShoreTel solutions mean companies spend much less time handling support calls about the phone system.

• Wireless integration allows mobility within the office, while ShoreTel Office Anywhere allows workers traveling between facilities to use any analog or cell phone as a primary extension, thereby extending the power of the ShoreTel system.

• ShoreTel centralizes voicemail and email for a unified management approach. ShoreTel Director lets administrators access the system from anywhere on the network, including remote locations, so they can easily manage every site and feature, including voicemail, automated attendant, and desktop applications.

•ShoreTel Hunt Groups directs incoming calls to ring certain extensions in a specified sequence or—depending on your preference—to ring multiple extensions at once.

•ShoreTel Communicator (formerly ShoreTel Call Manager) integrates with critical desktop and business process applications, so clients calling into the system can easily take advantage of integrated messaging capabilities—including directory dialing, contact screen pop, caller ID, call waiting, and calendar integration.

•Voicemail messages can be stored and delivered as WAV files, so employees can access messages via email when they’re away from the phone, while system administrators gain a simpler way to keep tabs on support or other requests.

6 | BEATING COMPLEXITY: Manufacturing

“The ease of administration is unbelievable. You can manage every system, including remote sites, so easily. For example, changing the greeting can be done once and every site is updated automatically. Before, we had to go into each system and change it, which did not allow for uniformity and was time-consuming.”

—SCoTT ZIPP, Senior Manager of Network Service Liberty Hardware

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“You can see that it was built from the ground up for growth and change. The system’s distributed architecture makes expansion easy—you just add another switch to the network. There’s no complex reprogramming or downtime.”

— JudE HENNESSEY, IT operations Manager Schratter Foods

ShoreTel: built to drive your success

• ShoreTel has a global presence in 35 countries, and supports in multiple languages.

• ShoreTel has been named best overall VoIP provider for six years running by Nemertes Research.

• ShoreTel backs its brilliant simple design with a lowest total cost of ownership guarantee program that uses third-party data for competitive comparisons.

About ShoreTel

ShoreTel is the provider of brilliantly simple Unified Communication (UC) solutions based on its award-winning IP business phone system. We offer organizations of all sizes integrated, voice, video, data, and mobile communications on an open, distributed IP architecture that helps significantly reduce the complexity and costs typically associated with other solutions. The feature-rich ShoreTel UC system offers the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) and the highest customer satisfaction in the industry, in part because it is easy to deploy, manage, scale and use. Increasingly, companies around the world are finding a competitive edge by replacing business-as-usual with new thinking, and choosing ShoreTel to handle their integrated business communication. ShoreTel is based in Sunnyvale, California, and has regional offices and partners worldwide. For more information, visit shoretel.com.

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Benefits ShoreTel positions you to produce satisfied customers

No matter how many players in your production line, satisfied customers are ultimately the key to success. That’s why the ShoreTel system is geared toward improving customer service through simplified communications. Here’s how we make it all worthwhile:

• ShoreTel helps you address caller requests without frustration on either end. Internally, ShoreTel Communicator identifies busy phone extensions before callers dial, saving time and reducing annoying voicemail checks and hold patterns.

• External callers can leverage ShoreTel’s distributed Hunt Groups to easily find the right resources anywhere within your organization.

• ShoreTel’s integrated Interactive Voice Response (IVR) application allows customers to reach the right person without human intervention and without having to wait on hold, offering easy-to-use directories and handy dial-by-name features.

• ShoreTel Contact Center provides sophisticated routing and queuing options to ensure fast delivery of calls to the right department or person.

• Powerful UC capabilities help employees be more productive, and they can focus on customer service in other critical arenas, instead of spending time dealing with phone communication issues.

• Simplified phone system management, reduced delays, and greater ease of use also help accelerate distribution cycles to speed time-to-market—so customers have faster, more convenient access to your goods.