Anthony Marano Company

Founded in 1950 by Anthony Marano and his wife, the company is located near downtown Chicago. It was started as a tomato repacker, and today serves the entire Midwest with fine fresh produce from its state-of the-art distribution center.

The 460,000 square foot facility contains 73 docks to receive and ship more than 1,400 types of fresh produce seven days a week. Today the company stands as one of the largest fresh produce distribution centers in the United States.

“When we first ran into ShoreTel Mobility we were interested in its solution because we heard it uses SIP and would solve all of our timing and handoff issues. We also heard it ran on Nokia and Windows Mobile phones, among others, which would give us all the functionality we need in a mobile handset, including a full suite of deskphone features, such as call transfer. ShoreTel Mobility’s high availability is also very important to us.”

 — Chris Nowak, CTO, Anthony Marano

The bulk of Anthony Marano Company’s workforce are corridor warriors—they are mobile inside and outside the “four walls” of the office and distribution facility—and their main challenge is a lack of high quality wireless voice coverage.

The distribution center’s large metal and concrete facility makes continuous cellular communications impossible for the staff which is constantly on the move between inside produce areas and offices, and outside shipping docks and receiving docks. Accessibility for these employees is critical because of the thousands of calls and requests the staff receives daily, and due to the fact that the company deals in fresh produce, a perishable commodity.

Always on the move, employees walking or driving pallet jacks could not make calls, and if a call was coming in it would be missed and land in voicemail. The system used a specialized phone—the Motorola CN 620—that did not support applications such as mobile email attachments (very important when you need pictures of vegetables), and wireless contact and calendar synchronization.

“Our users say that ShoreTel Mobility offers us the whole package, and they are pleased with the voice quality, address look up synchronization, and speed of handover moving inside and out. This is a demanding group that’s hard to please—their jobs depend on the performance of this technology—but they told me that they are very impressed. That’s good to finally hear. For us, ShoreTel Mobility’s unique seamless handoff capability promises to be a technological leap from previous solutions we have seen and tried.”

— Chris Nowak, CTO, Anthony Marano

Following some initial meetings and due diligence, a small group of trial users set off on what would be a four-week evaluation of ShoreTel Mobility. Some of the criteria the team used to evaluate ShoreTel Mobility included speed, reliability, functionality enabled in the handset, and speed and quality of handoff between Anthony Marano Company’s Meru Networks WLAN and outdoor cellular services.

The trial was a huge success, and the IT group began a full-scale rollout to the workforce of mobile users.

Benefits include:

• Exceptional voice quality, even under challenging working conditions
• Seamless and rapid handover moving inside and out of the buildings
• Tight integration with the Avaya PBX
• Less voicemail, leading to greater productivity and increased revenues

“We do millions of dollars of business transactions all day via the phone; no paperwork no contracts. If I’m not on the phone we’re not making money. ShoreTel Mobility gives us universal coverage and reliable and efficient highspeed access to the PBX, which is critical to our company.”

— Anton J. Marano, Tomato Sales Manager, Anthony Marano