ShoreTel provides a unified communications system for manufacturing companies that allows for scalability across distributed sites, high reliability to avoid production delays, and easy management to reduce IT costs. The system's distributed architecture ensures communications continue even if a site goes down. ShoreTel helps manufacturers streamline operations and customer service to increase efficiency and time to market.

1. Beating communications complexity.
MANUFACTURING

2. “ShoreTel’s low total cost of ownership clearly
demonstrated that ShoreTel was the best investment to
meet our requirements.”
— JIM LYLE, Communications Administrator
Ready Pac
ShoreTel in manufacturing
• Scalability: Dealing with distributed offices and numerous remote plants? ShoreTel
helps you unify communications between all your sites—including integration
with legacy systems—so you can ensure continued growth that leverages existing
assets without costly production delays.
• Availability and reliability: With more than 99.999 percent (five nines) availability
and IP phone failover, ShoreTel ensures reliable communications throughout
the entire value chain, helping to avoid production and distribution disruptions and
speed time to market.
• Ease of use and management: Through advanced call-routing features and
centralized management across the system, ShoreTel helps reduce costly
operational headaches, while ensuring high levels of user adoption and complete
customer satisfaction.
2 | BEATING COMPLEXITY: Manufacturing

3. Overview
In today’s dynamic global economy, manufacturers are under mounting pressure to
compete while margins shrink. Aggressive pricing and more demanding customers
are forcing many manufacturing companies to refocus business processes and
systems with an eye on efficiency and reliability. Among the most vital of those
systems is communications. When a company’s value chain encompasses an ever-
increasing number of factory sites, distributors, and retailers, phone communications
between each point become inextricably linked to employee productivity, time-to-
market, and even revenue.
No matter what type of product they deliver, manufacturing enterprises need to
ensure that workers can reliably contact one another with speed and ease, regardless
of their locations. Likewise, corporate expansion must be a smooth and efficient
process for those managing communications systems. Even a small glitch or missing
feature can contribute to costly delays or shutdowns, which in turn hurt both the
bottom line and the company’s reputation.
Fortunately, ShoreTel provides a brilliantly simple solution for manufacturing
organizations. Our unified communications (UC) system provides the rich feature set,
reliability, and low total cost of ownership that manufacturing companies need to
function, serve, and succeed:
• Scalability: ShoreTel makes it simple to deploy and manage communications
between numerous offices and plants, while ensuring quick system growth as you
expand.
• Reliability and high availability: ShoreTel provides exceptional reliability, helping
to eliminate distribution delays and empowering workers to be more productive.
• Ease of use and management: ShoreTel’s centralized system management and
powerful features do not require special skills and certifications so your IT team have
more time and resources to focus on core business projects.
The ShoreTel UC system helps manufacturers leverage these benefits to transform
communications throughout the product lifecycle chain, resulting in the lowest total
cost of ownership (TCO) in the industry and the highest customer satisfaction levels.
ShoreTel customers: manufacturing
• Grande Cache Coal • NORPAC Foods
• Schratter Foods • Quaker Fabric
• Markem-Imaje • IIMAK
• Ready Pac • Woods Equipment Company
• JT Packard • Warn Industries
• Down Lite International • OFS Optics
• Liberty Hardware Manufacturing
Corporation
3

4. The ShoreTel distributed architecture
ShoreTel Director
PSTN
/ITSP
HEADQUARTERS INTERNATIONAL
BRANCH
Headquarters Server
(System Adminstration, voicemail, ShoreTel
ShoreTel Communicator &
auto attendant, work groups)
Communicator & RoamAnywhere
[Physical or Virtual]
RoamAnywhere
Analog
Device ShoreTel
Voice Switches
ShoreTel
Contact Communicator Distributed Voice
Center
Server (voicemail
& auto attendant)
ShoreTel [Physical or Virtual]
ShoreTel Appliances
(Collaboration, Communicator
VPN Concentrator, Contact Center
& Mobility Router) ShoreTel
ShoreTel IP Phone
IP Phone
ShoreTel
Voice Switches
IP WAN
ShoreTel
Communicator &
ShoreTel RoamAnywhere
ShoreTel Voice Switch
Communicator & ShoreTel
RoamAnywhere Communicator
ShoreTel
Legacy VPN Phone
Voicemail
OFFICE
Legacy ANYWHERE
Phones
Legacy PBX
PSTN
/ ITSP
REGIONAL OFFICE
PSTN
SINGL E
E-IMAGE ARCHITECTUR
ShoreTel
Instant communications throughout the supply chain
The ShoreTel IP phone system is based on a distributed architecture that ensures no
single point of failure. Setup is intuitive and straightforward: Call control is distributed
to intelligent gateways known as voice switches, and ShoreTel voice applications
—including voicemail and automated attendant—run on standard server hardware
from anywhere on your IP network.
The ShoreTel distributed architecture incorporates a switch-based hardware platform
that is managed centrally through our intuitive Web-based interface, ShoreTel
Director. Each switch and site works like an independent call processor and continues
to operate seamlessly in the event of wide area network (WAN) failure. Unlike other
solutions, all servers can be disconnected from the ShoreTel switches and the
ShoreTel phone system continues to place and receive calls.
4 | BEATING COMPLEXITY: Manufacturing

5. Scalability
Manufacturing companies are constantly expanding into new geographies and growing
their distribution networks to stay competitive. While they achieve this growth, however,
they frequently face budget constraints that prevent them from reinventing technology
infrastructure across the board. Often, new locations need to continue deploying
applications and platforms already in place at existing sites—and they need to know that
their ability to communicate between sites isn’t slowed down by these legacy systems.
After all, growth is about building potential—not stunting it.
ShoreTel’s distributed architecture lets you connect your many facilities with a unified
corporate brand, even as you scale to add new employees, offices, and regions. Here’s
how we do it:
• With ShoreTel Director and our distributed, switch-based architecture, you get fast
plug-and-play deployment, so you can easily add thousands of phone lines and even
more users—without facing connection limitations.
• No matter how many sites you add or where they are located, employees can still use
4-digit dialing or dial-by-name right from the desktop to reach any colleague at any site.
• External callers to the system simply dial one number, and the automated attendant
directs them to the right place.
• ShoreTel facilitates legacy system integration as well. In addition to phasing in with
your existing phone system for faster rollout, we also integrate with other critical
communications applications, so you can remain connected to vital calendar and
contact details.
Availability and reliability
Many manufacturing companies have facilities strewn across numerous countries—even in
very remote areas. If communications fail between primary offices and more remote sites
for any reason, companies can face costly delays or even total shutdowns. Obviously, these
types of breaks in the value chain can result in needless expenses or more devastating
business consequences, including losses in partner, distributor, and customer relationships.
The ShoreTel UC system has no single point of failure, even across multiple sites, and offers
enterprise-class high availability. Here’s how we support your need for consistent uptime
and performance:
• Through distributed call control and N+1 failover, ShoreTel delivers simple, cost-
effective reliability. A single ShoreTel Voice Switch can provide backup to any
number (N) of other switches. In the unlikely case of a ShoreTel switch failure, phones
automatically failover to another voice switch, providing your company with complete
redundancy no matter how many lines you are running.
• Our switches are highly reliable and have no moving parts (except for a fan), redundant
Ethernet ports, and a real-time operating system.
• ShoreTel’s distributed architecture automatically responds to and works around LAN,
WAN or PSTN failures to provide nonstop phone operation, so you can always respond
quickly and effectively to any urgent requests or unexpected emergencies.
5

6. “The ease of administration is unbelievable. You can manage every
system, including remote sites, so easily. For example, changing
the greeting can be done once and every site is updated
automatically. Before, we had to go into each system and change
it, which did not allow for uniformity and was time-consuming.”
—Scott Zipp, Senior Manager of Network Service
Liberty Hardware
Ease of use and ease of management
By virtue of their industry, manufacturing companies rely on technology to streamline
business operations and facilitate business processes. IT and other system administrators
in these businesses don’t have the resources or inclination to manage complex
communication systems. They need to remain attentive to regular business operations
that drive value for the organization, and they need a communications platform that not
only requires minimal support but also empowers them to become more productive.
The ShoreTel system is designed to dramatically simplify communications management
and increase productivity for users and administrators without demanding lengthy
training sessions. Here’s how we cut complexity and drive down the associated costs:
• Brilliantly simple ShoreTel solutions mean companies spend much less time handling
support calls about the phone system.
• Wireless integration allows mobility within the office, while ShoreTel Office Anywhere
allows workers traveling between facilities to use any analog or cell phone as a primary
extension, thereby extending the power of the ShoreTel system.
• ShoreTel centralizes voicemail and email for a unified management approach. ShoreTel
Director lets administrators access the system from anywhere on the network, including
remote locations, so they can easily manage every site and feature, including voicemail,
automated attendant, and desktop applications.
• ShoreTel Hunt Groups directs incoming calls to ring certain extensions in a specified
sequence or—depending on your preference—to ring multiple extensions at once.
• ShoreTel Communicator (formerly ShoreTel Call Manager) integrates with critical
desktop and business process applications, so clients calling into the system can easily
take advantage of integrated messaging capabilities—including directory dialing,
contact screen pop, caller ID, call waiting, and calendar integration.
• Voicemail messages can be stored and delivered as WAV files, so employees can access
messages via email when they’re away from the phone, while system administrators
gain a simpler way to keep tabs on support or other requests.
6 | BEATING COMPLEXITY: Manufacturing

7. “You can see that it was built from the ground up for growth and
change. The system’s distributed architecture makes expansion
easy—you just add another switch to the network. There’s no
complex reprogramming or downtime.”
— Jude Hennessey, IT Operations Manager
Schratter Foods
ShoreTel: built to drive your success
• ShoreTel has a global presence in 35 countries, and supports in multiple languages.
• ShoreTel has been named best overall VoIP provider for six years running by Nemertes
Research.
• ShoreTel backs its brilliant simple design with a lowest total cost of ownership
guarantee program that uses third-party data for competitive comparisons.
7

8. Benefits
ShoreTel positions you to produce satisfied customers
No matter how many players in your production line, satisfied customers are ultimately
the key to success. That’s why the ShoreTel system is geared toward improving customer
service through simplified communications. Here’s how we make it all worthwhile:
• ShoreTel helps you address caller requests without frustration on either end. Internally,
ShoreTel Communicator identifies busy phone extensions before callers dial, saving time
and reducing annoying voicemail checks and hold patterns.
• External callers can leverage ShoreTel’s distributed Hunt Groups to easily find the right
resources anywhere within your organization.
• ShoreTel’s integrated Interactive Voice Response (IVR) application allows customers to
reach the right person without human intervention and without having to wait on hold,
offering easy-to-use directories and handy dial-by-name features.
• ShoreTel Contact Center provides sophisticated routing and queuing options to ensure
fast delivery of calls to the right department or person.
• Powerful UC capabilities help employees be more productive, and they can focus on
customer service in other critical arenas, instead of spending time dealing with phone
communication issues.
• Simplified phone system management, reduced delays, and greater ease of use also help
accelerate distribution cycles to speed time-to-market—so customers have faster, more
convenient access to your goods.
About ShoreTel
ShoreTel is the provider of brilliantly simple Unified Communication (UC) solutions based on its
award-winning IP business phone system. We offer organizations of all sizes integrated, voice,
video, data, and mobile communications on an open, distributed IP architecture that helps
significantly reduce the complexity and costs typically associated with other solutions. The
feature-rich ShoreTel UC system offers the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) and the highest
customer satisfaction in the industry, in part because it is easy to deploy, manage, scale and
use. Increasingly, companies around the world are finding a competitive edge by replacing
business-as-usual with new thinking, and choosing ShoreTel to handle their integrated business
communication. ShoreTel is based in Sunnyvale, California, and has regional offices and partners
worldwide. For more information, visit shoretel.com.
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