Staughton Group
From PABX to Cloud: How Staughton Group Transformed with RingCentral
Managed inhouse
Achieved the goal of managing the telephony platform entirely in-house
Flexible & Reliable
Reliable and flexible communications to support hybrid working and 24/7 operational support
Increased Productivity
Analytics from the platform identifying business productivity and process improvements
We closely analysed both Microsoft Teams Phone and RingCentral, and the maturity and cost of the RingCentral solution were the deciding factors.
Shawn Russell
Director of Technology Staughton Group
Established in 1995, Staughton Group produces pet food for the Australian and international markets from its processing centre in Howlong, a town on the Murray River midway between Sydney and Melbourne. Its manufacturing divisions are Cool Off, Australia’s premier producer of pet food raw meats, and Murray River Pet Food, Australia’s largest producer of premium dried food ingredients through both private label manufacturing and its own brands – Open Paddock, Balanced Life, Vets All Natural and Aussie Pet Health.
Staughton Group has a small in-house IT team that is largely self-sufficient, with some third-party support provided by a regional Microsoft specialist. The company had been operating on an out-of-support on-premise Mitel PABX that represented a major business risk, with no redundancy on the service and no backup hardware available. Also, its administration interface made any moves, adds and changes difficult and time-consuming.
“If the Mitel system went down, we would have no phones for days, and changes that should have taken seconds were taking us hours,” said Shawn Russell, Information Technology Manager, Staughton Group.
Based on a recommendation from its managed services provider, Staughton Group decided to upgrade to RingCentral MVP.
“We closely analysed both Microsoft Teams Phone and RingCentral, and the maturity and cost of the RingCentral solution were the deciding factors,” said Russell. “Also, with Microsoft Teams, we would still have to manage a separate VoIP carriage service – with RingCentral it’s all just one service.”
Another deciding factor was a simple upgrade experience in replacing Mitel on-premise hardware with RingCentral’s cloud-based unified communications solution, thanks to a global partnership between RingCentral and Mitel.
Seamless upgrade experience
With RingCentral providing project management support throughout the process, the upgrade experience was as seamless as expected. “The changeover was very straightforward and there was almost no downtime whatsoever; it was literally minutes,” said Russell. “The procurement process that RingCentral has built into their platform is very straightforward and quick. As an example, twenty handsets we ordered one day were delivered two days later.”
Staughton Group rolled out a combination of softphones and physical Yealink handsets for users, with the hardware pre-configured to be virtually plug and play – some internal customisation was required, including populating the address books on the handsets from Microsoft 365, to bring across each user’s office extension, mobile number, department and business unit.
“When people are making RingCentral calls, they can just search by the name. They used to have to look up a printed Excel sheet that was updated every month but now they have the whole directory at their fingertips,” said Russell.
RingCentral also produces a transcript of each voicemail, accessible via both the user’s RingCentral app and email inbox. That makes it much easier to check and respond to voicemails with the message details and number displayed on screen.
Resiliency and flexibility
RingCentral’s cloud platform provides comprehensive security controls and full redundancy, enabling Staughton Group to focus its investment on multiple levels of redundancy for its internet services on site, with a potential failover to 4G and 5G cellular services if required.
The resilience of the RingCentral platform is matched by its flexibility, supporting hybrid working for some staff.
“Even if our staff are working from home, they can still answer call queues just as they would in the office. Also, RingCentral’s reporting and analytics ensures that we know the right calls are going to the right people, helping us to finetune our auto attendant settings and provide us with insights to better manage our staff workloads.”
RingCentral’s configurability has also transformed Staughton Group’s maintenance operations. Electrical, mechanical and refrigeration support are all critical to its manufacturing operations. Each service operates on different support schedules, with advanced call routing and call queues programmed in RingCentral to ensure calls are going to the right person, first time.
“It means we don't also have to issue data sims or mobile phones for every support person – we can have just one or two accounts per support service. On top of that, we are using RingCentral analytics to monitor call responsiveness and whether or not our third-party contractors are meeting their support KPIs,” said Russell.
Insights leading to process improvements
RingCentral’s analytics are also having a surprising effect on improving Staughton Group’s production processes. By analysing call volumes and call flows between different stages of the process, potential problems can be identified and action taken.
“Our IT team is very engaged with the organisation, so we have a shared responsibility in Staughton Group’s overall business outcomes. If we see a lot of calls into or out from one particular area of production, that probably means they're not getting all the information they need in a timely fashion and it's slowing down their execution. With the insight we are getting from the RingCentral system, our management team can do something quickly to address any issues,” said Russell.
The ease of management and configuration of the RingCentral platform has enabled the telephony platform to be managed entirely in-house and has had a three-fold impact on the IT team. It’s not just saving them up to a day a month; it’s also allowing the team to do a lot more with the system than they could do before, and avoiding the delays and costs associated with third-party support calls on what should be straightforward administration changes.
International plans
As well as supplying many retailers in Australia, Staughton Group exports to Asia, Europe and United States. With an increase in its direct export business to the US, it is considering establishing a US customer service phone number, supported in both Australian and US timezones.
“With RingCentral, we can have US dial-in numbers that can be supported by a team here or a team in the US. We can route calls accordingly, and follow the sun,” said Russell.
RingCentral’s global presence and centralised management capabilities will ensure Staughton Group’s communications needs can be supported wherever their business grows.