IPS Packaging & Automation
This top provider of packaging supplies uses RingCentral unified communications to respond more promptly to customers and improve operations through video calls and online faxing.
200
employees now have the ability to host video calls – after sharing a single company license before RingCentral
1
integrated platform enabling phone calls, video conferencing, and online faxing from any device
What’s great about RingCentral is that our sales and support reps have flexibility in where they take calls from customers. That’s helped improve our responsiveness and our customer service.
Josh Palmer
IT Support Specialist
One of the country’s most trusted suppliers of packaging solutions
Few businesses in the world understand the value of proper packaging – to keep costs down, ensure the safe delivery of goods, and even protect the environment – better than IPS Packaging & Automation.
With a track record spanning more than four decades, IPS Packaging & Automation has earned a reputation as an innovator and become a go-to partner for well-known brands and products across the US – in fields as diverse as aerospace and food processing. In 2018, Honda recognized IPS Packaging & Automation with its “Excellence in Delivery” award.
INDUSTRY
Manufacturing
HQ
Fountain Inn, SC
YEAR FOUNDED
1976
EMPLOYEES
200
A legacy phone system had the company boxed in
Over the years, IPS Packaging & Automation has taken significant steps to honor its commitment to excellent customer service. For example, the company knows how important a shipment of packaging supplies can be to a manufacturer eager to get its products to the market. So IPS Packaging & Automation built nearly a dozen distribution centers strategically around the country, and developed its own logistics operation, to ensure the company can rapidly deliver products to customers.
But when it came to another key area of customer service – being accessible and responsive to customers by phone – the company found itself facing challenges with its on-prem phone system. Those challenges came to a head when the system’s manufacturer ran into problems of its own.
As IT Support Specialist Josh Palmer explains, “When the manufacturer went out of business, we had trouble getting phone support, finding new hardware for the system, and adding phone licenses.”
Lack of vendor support wasn’t the only challenge IPS Packaging & Automation faced with its communications environment. As Josh adds, “We also had traditional fax machines at our offices – not the most efficient use of anyone’s time. And we had only a single license for our video conferencing app, so every time someone wanted to host an online meeting, they’d have to come to me to schedule it.”
Finding all the communications capabilities they needed in a single platform
RingCentral’s cloud communications solution addressed all of these IT challenges. Josh and his team no longer had trouble managing aging phone servers or other hardware, because the system was entirely cloud based and didn’t require any on-prem infrastructure.
Additionally, for the first time in the company’s history, IPS Packaging & Automation now had a phone system flexible enough to allow all of its employees to make and take business calls from anywhere, using any internet device. “All they had to do was download the RingCentral app for their laptops or cell phones,” Josh explains, “and our employees could stay connected to each other and our customers from anywhere.”
In fact, RingCentral also solved several other frustrating IT communication challenges for the company. Because the solution includes built-in digital fax capability, Josh’s team was finally able to get rid of the fax machines and dedicated fax lines at each of the company’s locations around the country.
Also, instead of having the entire company share a single online-meeting license, IPS Packaging & Automation uses RingCentral Video to give all employees the ability to schedule and host their own video conferences, anytime.
Now that everyone has RingCentral Video on their phones and computers, it’s so much easier for us to have meetings by video whenever we need to. It also saves my team a lot of time because we don’t have to intervene anymore every time someone wants to schedule a conference.
Josh Palmer
IT Support Specialist
Prepared for a disaster nobody saw coming
Although the company was already extremely pleased with its all-in-one cloud communications platform long before COVID-19, Josh points out that the pandemic revealed yet another major benefit of migrating to RingCentral.
When the lockdowns forced employees to vacate the company’s offices and begin working from home, having a cloud-based communications solution that works anywhere proved even more valuable.
I can’t imagine the nightmare of trying to adjust everyone during the lockdowns if we didn’t have RingCentral. But all we had to do was make sure everyone had the app on their computer or on their mobile phone. That was it. Everyone was up and running at home… taking customer calls, faxing online, hosting video calls… with no trouble.
Josh Palmer
IT Support Specialist