ICON Materials

ICON Materials is western Washington’s leader in paving and site development. Whether a mountain needs to be moved, a building site needs to be prepared, or a homeowner needs pavement, ICON handles it. Companies like Atlas Paving, the City of Seattle, Corliss Construction, Emerald Paving, Miles Sand & Gravel, Northwest Asphalt, the Port of Tacoma, Target Corporation, The Boeing Company, Union Pacific Railroad, and more rely on ICON’s high quality products and service. ICON has 300 employees in five locations in Washington State.

“ShoreTel offered a lower bottom-line cost, including the cost to implement, monthly costs, and maintenance costs. ShoreTel was just much cleaner and more efficient than the Inter-Tel solution.”
— Andrey Marchenko, Network Administrator,  ICON Materials.

In 2004, ICON was conducting its annual budget analysis and looked closely at its communications costs, including phone lines, service fees, toll charges and management. ICON was using a Merlin PBX telephone system and Centrex phone lines at some of its locations. The company decided it was time to take advantage of the leading edge infrastructure that had been put in place to capitalize on the benefits of IP (VoIP). In addition to providing significant savings, ICON knew that VoIP would improve its overall communications and simplify management. ICON sought in its new phone system cost-effectiveness, scalability, reliability, ease of use and management, and a strong local support team.

“With ShoreTel, I can bring up a new user at a new site within ten minutes — an activity that took about four days with the old system. With the old system, I had to contact the phone company and then wait for a technician to come out. Now I have full control and things run so much more smoothly.”
— Andrey Marchenko, Network Administrator,  ICON Materials.

While getting ICON’s LAN/WAN ready for VoIP required a fair amount of up-front work, the entire implementation still only took about three weeks. ShoreTel’s local partner provided ICON with four ShoreTel switches for its five locations, including ShoreTel 40, 60, and 120 models. ICON also phased in over 75 IP phones, including the ShoreTel 210, 530, and 560 IP Phones. The new IP phones were installed alongside the old analog phones so users could use either one during the transition, but users quickly became familiar with the ShoreTel system and the analog phones were soon gone. Benefits include:

• Significant cost savings achieved with the elimination of long distance and line-lease charges allows.
• ICON’s IT staff can maintain the system with the Web-based interface of ShoreTel Director, making all moves, adds, and changes in-house, and in minutes.
• Productivity-enhancing unified communications features such as visual voicemail, presence information, and dial-by-name have gone a long way toward ensuring a high level of adoption by ICON’s staff.
• The system, which looks and behaves like a single, unified platform, scales with plug-and-play simplicity across sites. All ICON employees are now on the same phone and voicemail system, using four-digit dialing to reach co-workers at any location.

 “In addition to cutting long distance costs, phone line charges, and management costs, we’ve increased our sales with ShoreTel in place because we can handle more calls at the same time.”
— Andrey Marchenko, Network Administrator,  ICON Materials.