IP Communications for Manufacturers

For over 100 years, New York Blower (www.nyb.com) has been a leading manufacturer of industrial fans and blowers. NYB carries the most complete product portfolio in the business, and its products are distributed through an extensive worldwide network of over 300 representatives.

The Challenge
New York Blower’s phone system was aging, and the provider announced that it was discontinuing support for the system. NYB was facing an expensive replacement.

“We were leaning toward staying with our current provider,” said John Mearns, NYB’s manager of information technology. “But we knew that would mean another major upgrade in three or four years, and another full replacement in eight or 10.”

To stay in touch in an expansive manufacturing facility where workers and managers had to be mobile, NYB was also paying for cell phones for shop-floor supervision. “We wanted supervisors on the shop floor supervising, instead of being tied to a desk,” Mearns said. “We needed mobility, but we were also looking to scale back our cellular expenses.”

NYB boiled its needs down to three basic goals:

• Stop having to replace its phone system every five years
• Control overall costs
• Find a better mobile communication system for the shop floor

The Test
NYB reached out to an Appia Partner. The partner explained the benefits of a hosted model, but it would take some convincing: NYB had kept an eye on VoIP solutions since 2000, but had always been unimpressed. “We just didn’t see the return on investment that was always promised,” Mearns said.

The first hurdle was crossed with an impromptu demonstration of an IP phone. “We just plugged it in and it worked,” Mearns said. “Within a couple of minutes, he could dial four digits and talk to his office manager from our conference room.”

It gave NYB the confidence that a hosted VoIP implementation was worth considering. But would the ROI add up? NYB compared several options and found that it did — and then some.

“Out of everything we looked at, the first 12 months of the Appia solution cost about 15% less,” Mearns said. “But over time, eliminating the cycle of update and replacement costs made the real difference. Over the expected 10-year life of a purchased system, this could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The hosted solution came out far ahead of anything else.”

The Solution
NYB expanded the implementation to include all three of its sites in La Porte, Indiana, Willowbrook, Illinois, and Effingham, Illinois. The process included a full Cisco network equipment refresh, configuration for over 200 phones, and dedicated Appia T-1 connections, giving NYB a truly private network for far less than it had been paying to use the public Internet.

“We used to have to handle this separately through another provider,” Mearns said. “The Appia Private Network is much cheaper, and it’s faster, even with phone traffic on it. Our users tell us they have noticed the improvement in performance, and we like that our business traffic is off the public Internet.”

NYB also took advantage of two of Appia’s network services, WANNet and WANCare Management. WANNet provides round-the-clock network equipment support, and WANCare Management is Appia’s 24/7/365 network monitoring and management service. The staff at Appia’s Network Operations Center monitors NYB’s network and provides reports.