Markem-Imaje

Markem-Imaje, a subsidiary of the Dover Group, offers a full line of inkjet, thermal transfer, laser, print and apply label systems, and RFID-based systems. With over 30 subsidiaries worldwide, Markem-Imaje provides more than 30,000 customers with optimal product marking and coding solutions. Supported by five R&D centers, several equipment repair centers, and manufacturing plants strategically located around the globe, communications is an important component of the company’s business — particularly in the product coding market, where global competition is tough and logistics increasingly complex.

“We wanted the ability to share call centers across borders, and still allow people to call local numbers. Not only is this important for customers who like to be able to call in-country, but we wanted to share distributed internal resources and expertise, too.”
- Frans Laverman, CIO, Markem-Imaje.

After the integration of Markem and Imaje in 2007, the company’s collection of aging and separate telephone systems no longer supported new features and communications technology. The Markem-Imaje team began looking for a new communications platform that supported call centers across borders, required minimal IT staff in each region, and could share services and applications regardless of location. 

“We had a museum patchwork of old telephone systems that were costly to maintain, and resulted in high calling costs across the company.”
- Frans Laverman, CIO, Markem-Imaje.

ShoreTel offered Markem-Imaje the opportunity to consolidate their global network of phone systems into one easy-to-manage, scalable, highly available, and cost-effective UC system. During the initial system installation in Keene, NH, IT staff training was performed by technical partner Corporate Voice & Data. After one half-day’s training, the technical team was able to deploy an additional 15 locations in less than five months. The deployment consisted of a ShoreTel UC system with more than 2,100 ShoreTel 230 IP Phones worldwide, running on ShoreTel T1 or ShoreTel E1 Voice Switches in combination with existing analog devices, and a 32-port ShoreTel Converged Conferencing solution. Implementation of ShoreTel’s Contact Center solution enabled the company to process calls throughout the U.S. and put them through to the appropriate agent in the various offices. Other benefits include:

• Easy deployment lets IT staff bring remote sites online quickly without requiring additional resources.
• Call centers that cross borders enable the company to offer localized customer services while optimizing internal resources and reducing maintenance time and costs.
• The system, which looks and behaves like a single, unified platform, scales with plug-and-play simplicity, enabling employees to communicate quickly and easily with each other regardless of their location.
• ShoreTel Converged Conferencing solution provides easy-to-use remote collaboration, and eliminates the need for third-party providers.
• Easy-to-configure N+1 redundancy provides effective disaster recovery.

“The ShoreTel UC system is so brilliantly simple to administer that I can deploy a site for between 40 to 60 users in less than four days.”
- Andy Cheung, Director of Network Infrastructure, Markem-Imaje.