Structural Technologies
RingCentral Supports Contractor’s Highly Collaborative Culture
RingCentral was the only provider we looked at that had a completeness of vision and a history of continuous improvement.
Jason Kasch
CIO, Structural Technologies
Structural Technologies integrates technology into its specialty contracting services to improve, protect, and repair infrastructure. “We make new and existing structures stronger and last longer,” is how Jason Kasch, Structural Technologies' CIO, describes the company’s mission. Structural Technologies has 2,500 employees and 30 operating centers worldwide, with most of their employees (approximately 1,800) working at 22 locations across North America. When Kasch was considering a unified communications (UC) solution for Structural Technologies, he had quite a list of requirements. For example, he needed to support a mobile workforce as well as a highly collaborative culture. “We have been doing video conferencing for almost 20 years,” he explains. The company had been using expensive, dedicated circuits for video conferencing, and Kasch hoped to reduce those costs. Other requirements for the UC solution included a similar user interface on every platform, a “single-click” interface to reach anyone, limited or no training requirements, and customizability through an API.
INDUSTRY
High Tech
HQ
Columbia, MD
YEAR FOUNDED
1976
EMPLOYEES
2,500
RingCentral selected for its “completeness of vision”
Kasch evaluated four unified communications as a service (UCaaS) solutions, including RingCentral. He chose RingCentral because in addition to meeting all of his requirements, “RingCentral was the only provider we looked at that had a completeness of vision and a history of continuous improvement,” he says.
He engaged RingCentral Professional Services to help with the implementation, which took only 90 days to deploy to the 22 North American locations. If that seems especially fast, Kasch explains that part of the reason is because they weren’t migrating to UCaaS from a traditional PBX system. “We were already with another UCaaS provider, so we had past experience working with a cloud PBX solution, and with RingCentral, the deployment was pretty seamless.” Because RingCentral Meetings™ is included with every RingEX™ subscription, Kasch saw the opportunity to stop paying for online meetings. First, he had to convince the skeptics, including some very heavy online-meeting users, that the RingCentral alternative was as good or better. After a 30-day pilot using RingCentral Meetings as part of the broader RingEX suite, those employees “really didn’t want that product pried out of their cold, dead hands,” he notes.
Kasch used RingCentral’s open APIs to create integrations with other business software, such as their customized HR system. He sees RingCentral as more than a communications solution. It’s also a key part of his disaster recovery and business continuity strategy. “When superstorm Sandy hit the east coast, we were one of few civil engineering contractors that was up,” Kasch says. “We could take phone calls from our homes and actually show up on-site to help clients with structural damage.”
Supporting a collaborative culture
With RingCentral, every Structural Technologies employee now has a powerful way to communicate and collaborate from any device and from anywhere. Kasch is especially happy to have the RingCentral collaboration functionality since it makes the company’s culture even more effective than it was in the past.
“With RingCentral, we have an all-in-one platform for team messaging, voice, video, meetings, and conferencing. RingCentral is not just about phone calls. It’s about allowing people to work the way they want to work using any tool they have,” he adds. A good example involves a typical engineering problem.
"Say someone is working on-site and sees something on a drawing that isn’t right, such as an access problem that wasn’t anticipated, for example,” Kasch explains. “That person can initiate a phone call or send a text and start a conversation with an engineer in the office about the problem. That engineer can have a conference with other engineers, change the drawings, and then share the new document through RingCentral to the work site. In the past, it would have taken one day to make the change and another day to have copies of the drawings sent out. Our engineers now get that kind of on-the-fly, just-in-time change done in 20 minutes to an hour.”
RingCentral is not just about phone calls. It’s about allowing people to work the way they want to work using any tool they have.
Jason Kasch
CIO, Structural Technologies