The Van Metre Companies

The Van Metre Companies is a family-owned business founded in 1955. The company has its headquarters in Burke, VA, and operates 30 branch offices throughout the Washington, D.C. area. While some of these facilities operate independently of each other, effective interaction and collaboration among Van Metre’s staff of 500 is critical. The company is known for its highly personalized service as well as innovative home design and excellent craftsmanship.

“The ability for our staff to quickly communicate with other staff members is important to our business because we’re spread over many sites.”
— Mike Saunders, Director of IT, Van Metre.

Until 2005, Van Metre relied on an aging Toshiba phone system at its headquarters. The PBX was running out of capacity and the company was completely out of new phone extensions. In establishing priorities for a new system, Van Metre sought richer communication features such as extension dialing among the sites, which would make communications more efficient, as well centralized management features that would permit them to make moves, adds, and changes in-house.

“The ease of management of the overall phone infrastructure is one thing that stands out about the ShoreTel system.”
— Mike Saunders, Director of IT, Van Metre.

The building company began implementing a ShoreTel IP phone system in June 2005. Van Metre has deployed ShoreTel equipment at 18 of its sites, including its corporate headquarters. ShoreTel’s local reseller helped Van Metre with the installations and provided ongoing maintenance for the equipment. Van Metre rolled out a mix of ShoreTel IP phones, which included analog cordless phones. Other equipment from ShoreTel includes three ShoreTel T1 Voice Switches, 13 ShoreTel 60s, 11 ShoreTel 40s, and two voicemail servers. Benefits include:

• ShoreTel Call Manager’s single interface enables employees to manage communications using their ShoreTel desk phone, computer, mobile phone, or home telephone, increasing productivity and easing collaboration.
• Significant time and cost savings achieved as the company’s small IT staff of five can maintain the system with ShoreTel Director, making all moves, adds, and changes in-house, and in minutes.
• The system, which looks and behaves like a single, unified platform, scales with plug-and-play simplicity, giving Van Metre four-digit dialing between all sites, and enabling employees to communicate quickly and easily with co-workers regardless of their location.
• Control over long distance costs by linking calls to account codes: users cannot make long distance calls without entering appropriate passwords.

“Having one login and one graphical interface to view network operations is a great benefit. This makes it fast and easy to implement a new site and provides added flexibility.”
— Mike Saunders, Director of IT, Van Metre.