Ready Pac

The convenience of fresh-cut fruits and vegetables in ready-to-serve packaging has kept Ready Pac at the forefront of the produce supply industry, and led to the company’s significant growth. Over the past 40 years, Ready Pac has relied on innovation, strategic relationships, and customer satisfaction to build a premium household brand with a broad product range. Effective communications — across sites, as well as with their retail and wholesale customers in the U.S. and Canada — is a key part of the company’s recipe for success.

 “The old system was dropping up to 10 calls a day, including customer calls, and effective repairs were becoming impossible.”
- Jim Lyle, Communications Administrator, Ready Pac.

After two recent company acquisitions, Ready Pac executives decided to replace the company’s phone system. Their existing equipment was actually three separate Avaya systems that would not integrate. Every time an employee called someone at another office, there was a toll charge and a lot of numbers to dial. Ready Pac sought a unified communications system that integrated communications across all sites, offered streamlined administration, and was easy to deploy and maintain.

“Our three main criteria for comparison were cost, reliability, and ease of management.”
- Jim Lyle, Communications Administrator, Ready Pac.

The new unified communications system was phased in over a two-month period, with ShoreTel Voice Switches and ShoreTel IP Phones installed at all four company sites. Deployment of ShoreTel 220 T1A, 120, and 24A Voice Switches, along with a spare ShoreTel T1A at each location, helped to ensure effective redundancy. Along with the ShoreTel IP Phones on employees’ desks, about 50 analog phone lines support fax machines and other analog devices. And because ShoreTel’s intuitive desktop tools are designed to be as easy to use, end-users were up and running after one-hour training sessions. Other benefits include:

• Cost savings of about $17,300/month on toll charges. ShoreTel’s least-cost call routing boosts this savings nearly every time an employee dials a call.
• Streamlined communications across sites and mobility-enhancing features improve productivity and help to ensure that sales team members are available to customers.
• High level of redundancy ensures reliability; five-nines (99.999%) availability keeps communications open throughout the distribution chain, so produce arrives fresh and ready-to-eat.
• Ease of management supports expansion plans and reduces the need for costly third-party support. Moves, adds, and changes can be done in-house from a single, Web-based interface.

“Our entire IT department is comprised of myself, plus 14 people, and we have not needed to add anyone or undergo extensive training to support and maintain the system.”
- Jim Lyle , Communications Administrator, Ready Pac.