As the personal mobile devices of employees become part of the enterprise infrastructure and flex-work schedules have them working at all hours of the day, communication cost are taking a bigger chunk of the budget. If organizations don’t take advantage of existing UC solutions available in the marketplace, the efficiency BYOD initiatives introduce can have low or negative ROI. This is especially true for companies that have multiple locations and thousands of employees. To overcome this challenge, Admiral Beverage selected MegaPath’s Hosted Voice and Unified Communications (News - Alert) (UC) solution.

Admiral was established in 1947 with just a single production line bottling two flavors. Today it operates 35 facilities across nine states producing and distributing hundreds of flavors and brands of beverages in bottles and cans. With so many locations and employees, the company was looking for a solution that would integrate all of these resources together with a comprehensive communications platform.

The communication challenges Admiral faced included PBXs that caused phone and voicemail outages that prevented internal and external customers from contacting fulfillment centers to order products. Additionally, the increasing cost of long-distance charges and outdated voice systems didn’t support today’s mobile business environment.

The MegaPath (News - Alert) solution will give Admiral the ability to operate 290 hosted voice and UC seats in 22 locations across the United States. It will also include more than 120 seats at corporate headquarters.

The UC platform provides a suite of real-time communications services which will include HD video calling, SMS texting, presence, instant messaging and screen sharing. All these features will be available in a single interface that can be used with Windows and Mac desktops as well as a range of mobile and tablet devices.

According to Admiral, it is expecting annual savings of $25,000 to $50,000. Additional benefits also include;

• Better communications among staff and customers with a feature-rich platform that can provide a stable phone system and voicemail support.
• Advanced features such as voicemail transcribed as email to simplify and streamline common tasks to monitor and respond to voicemail quickly while away from the office.
• Allow staff across nine states to choose how they communicate with real-time collaboration tools in MegaPath UC, using their choice of devices.

“Today’s businesses requires solutions that enable employees to easily and instantly connect and collaborate in a variety of ways, regardless of their location or device,” said Kurt Hoffman (News - Alert), President, MegaPath.