Liberty Hardware Manufacturing Corporation

Since 1942, Liberty Hardware Manufacturing Corporation has offered high-quality decorative and functional hardware products through retail outlets and OEM distribution channels across the United States. Headquartered in Winston-Salem, NC, the company has offices and distribution facilities in New Jersey, California, the U.K., and China. In late 2004, Liberty Hardware embarked on an initiative to improve internal communications between all of its worldwide locations.

“Before, we had to go into each system and change it, which did not allow for uniformity and was time-consuming.”
— Scott Zipp, Senior Manager of Network Services, Liberty Hardware.

Liberty Hardware sought to make continual improvements to its call center operations, as well as refinements to maximize its budget overall. The analysis and reporting of call volume this required was simply not possible with its existing telephone system — a combination of solutions from vendors including Avaya and Centrex. The system overall was also cumbersome and costly to manage. As part of their research into a new solution, the Liberty team talked to customer references and tested products right on their own network.

“ShoreTel met our business requirements at a fraction of the budget we had planned.”
— Scott Zipp, Senior Manager of Network Services, Liberty Hardware.

Liberty Hardware chose ShoreTel for its ease of administration, cost-effectiveness, and the flexibility of its open, distributed architecture. ShoreTel’s channel partner in Charlotte, NC, installed five ShoreTel T1 Voice Switches at headquarters. A total of five more were installed in their New Jersey, California, and U.K. facilities, and a ShoreTel 40 Voice Switch was also deployed in Liberty’s small remote office. The addition of 200 ShoreTel 210 IP Phones, and another 200 ShoreTel 530 IP Phones, completed the hardware component of the internal communications improvement initiative. Key to the deployment’s success was that ShoreTel offered the flexibility to implement the new system in a phased approach. Other benefits include:

• Huge costs savings of over $211,000 in the first year. These savings include maintenance, toll charges, and management, including moves, adds, and changes.
• Reduced toll charges, as all 500 Liberty Hardware employees worldwide are on the same phone system.
• Least-cost routing capabilities help Liberty to minimize costs by routing calls through the company’s data lines, thus bypassing toll charges.
• Centralized management frees IT resources for more critical tasks. Making adds, moves, and changes is as simple as clicking a button.
• The scalable system allowed Liberty to enjoy the same benefits at its smaller sites.

“We estimate the ShoreTel system will have paid for itself in just over a year, which is a terrific return on investment.”
— Scott Zipp, Senior Manager of Network Services, Liberty Hardware.