NORPAC Foods

NORPAC Foods, headquartered in Stayton, Oregon, is a major processor of fruits and vegetables. NORPAC’s frozen and canned products are distributed from its three locations through food service, club, export, and retail marketplaces under their FLAV-R-PAC^®, WESTPAC^®, and Santiam^® brands. Across the organization, mission-critical communications between sales, production scheduling, inventory management, and plant operations are a priority. For the benefit of both customer service and internal operations, all calls need to be handled quickly and effectively.

“NORPAC is very careful when it spends money and a new phone system had been a topic of discussion for some time.”
- Jim Stromvig, IT Manager, NORPAC Foods.

In late 2004, NORPAC had antiquated PBX systems at each of its three major locations, as well as multiple key systems. Though the systems were more than end-of-life, an upgrade was not an option because the switches themselves were becoming unreliable. NORPAC established a task force, including network administrators, engineers, and purchasing managers, to evaluate traditional PBX and VoIP solutions. NORPAC’s research included speaking with customer references and seeing demonstrations of various products. Despite some team members’ initial reservations about VoIP, the research ultimately spoke for itself, and the task force quickly came to a collective conclusion.

“The ShoreTel architecture was developed for IP technology; it wasn’t retrofitted for IP as some of the other offerings we looked at. ShoreTel has helped us improve customer service and office productivity. It has to support mission-critical traffic between all of our offices.”
- Jim Stromvig, IT Manager, NORPAC Foods.

NORPAC Foods chose ShoreTel for its robust feature set, ease of implementation and administration, and five-nines (99.999 percent) reliability. Following necessary wiring changes, the ShoreTel deployment at the first of the three offices took just one weekend day. The other two offices were cut over to ShoreTel the following weekends, so NORPAC’s customers were none the wiser for the change. ShoreTel’s equipment installation included 22 ShoreTel Voice Switches and a number of ShoreTel IP phones. The solution integrated seamlessly, including connectivity to two PBX switches at other NORPAC facilities. Until it’s ready to move to a complete IP phone system, NORPAC will be able to keep a number of their existing analog phones. Other benefits include:

• Enhanced productivity with a built-in suite of versatile, real-time tools that put flexible features, telephony and IM control, and collaboration services at NORPAC employees’ fingertips.
• An improved customer experience, as key contact information is included with every call, enabling receptionists to offer more personalized attention than before.
• 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.
• NORPAC enjoys a lower total cost of ownership (TCO), as ShoreTel Director’s intuitive, Web-based interface eases administrative burdens and frees IT resources for more critical tasks.

“A new phone system has company-wide exposure and failure was not an option. That’s why we went with ShoreTel.”
- Jim Stromvig, IT Manager, NORPAC Foods.