Grande Cache Coal

Coal — dubbed Canada’s “forgotten” energy source — has gained a new lease on life in recent years, thanks to trends like a growing market for premium, low volatile, metallurgical coking coal. Grande Cache Coal Corporation (GCC) is one of the companies leading this industry's renewal. Using its sustainable, next-generation mining methodology, GCC began producing specialty metallurgical coking coal in 2004 in Canada’s Grande Cache, Alberta region. With its purchasing, warehousing, and maintenance operations located 25 km from the small town of Grande Cache, communications with remote mining operations are truly the lifeblood of  GCC’s business.

“We didn’t want to have to worry about having to replace the system to accommodate future growth.”
— Thayer Ramahi, Senior Infrastructure Engineer, GCC.

A legacy Nortel PBX supplied telephone services to the company offices in Grande Cache. With many points of failure, the system was costly and difficult to maintain. It often required expensive service calls, including travel charges, from service providers to resolve connection problems that left GCC without phone service several days each month. Harsh winters, rugged and mountainous terrain, and the mines being situated beyond the reach of commercial telecommunications infrastructure presented GCC with site-specific challenges. Further, the communications gap affected internal morale; without a unified system, employees had to dial 10-digit codes just to reach another office.

“Any time we wanted to make changes — move or add a phone or extension — we had to call a Nortel service provider. In one case, it took three weeks simply to connect a new extension.”
— Thayer Ramahi, Senior Infrastructure Engineer, GCC.

The GCC team was particularly impressed that ShoreTel had many features that other, more expensive, systems lacked, and that the user interface and documentation were intuitive and easy to understand. The fact that they would not only be able to make all changes in-house, but also manage the voice switches remotely, sealed the deal. GCC rolled out its first ShoreTel implementation in the company’s Calgary headquarters in August, 2008, followed by rollout four months later to the Grande Cache offices and the company’s two mines. Other benefits include:

• ShoreTel’s open, distributed architecture, intuitive management interface, and plug-and-play scalability let GCC staff manage the system centrally to support its rapidly growing operations.
• The system's reliable, high-quality voice communications for remote sites are essential for successful mining operations, and for maintaining safety, productivity, and morale.
• Reduced overall costs, including significant maintenance costs, and eliminated unpredictable per-incident service charges and toll costs for interoffice calls.
• ShoreTel’s built-in reliability and disaster recovery helps prevent costly mine shutdowns caused by loss of communications.

“ShoreTel delivered exactly what we were looking for.”
— Thayer Ramahi, Senior Infrastructure Engineer, GCC.