We saved about $27,000 in upfront hardware and set up costs with RingCentral versus our old PBX system. On an ongoing basis, we save about $1,000 a month compared to our prior service.
Tom Merz
Director of IT and facilities, Organic By Nature
Organic By Nature creates premium whole food supplements from dehydrated fruits and vegetables. Since it was founded in 1993, Organic By Nature has become recognized for setting a new standard in plant-based nutritional products by rejecting the trend toward mega-dosages of vitamins and minerals. The company sells its nutritious supplements directly to consumers and through a network of nearly 1000 independent retail outlets, which include some national chains like Whole Foods and Wild Oats.
Challenge
Organic By Nature needed to consolidate several buildings into one. This included vacating the main building where the company’s legacy PBX phone system hardware resided. Tom Merz, director of IT and facilities, explored moving the existing PBX hardware into the new building. Not only did he find that the heavy hardware would be difficult to physically move but that the new building did not have enough copper lines to support the PBX system. After adding up all of the costs of reinstalling the old PBX in the new building, Merz determined that it would cost between $60,000 to $80,000 to install and setup the hardware. Merz also knew that the old PBX system was limited. While it was good for voice mails and transferring one extension to another, it was difficult to set up and he often had to rely on a specialized technician for something as routine as creating an extension for a new employee. With a 2-hour minimum at $150 an hour, it was expensive to call in a technician every time he needed help.
Solution
The expense and complexity of his old PBX system drove Merz to explore RingCentral’s cloud-based business phone system after hearing about it on Leo Laporte’s weekend radio show. He wanted a phone system that didn’t require tens of thousands of dollars in upfront investment costs. Nor did he want to have to call a technician every time someone moved to a new desk and needed their extension to go with them. Lastly, he wanted employees to be able to set up their own phone settings such as being able to change their last name in the settings when they got married. Merz, after evaluating several other cloud PBX providers, decided that RingCentral best met his needs and set up 25 users in the main building with four to five remote users.
We saved about $27,000 in upfront hardware and set up costs with RingCentral versus our old PBX system. On an ongoing basis, we save about $1,000 a month compared to our prior service.
Tom Merz
Director of IT and facilities, Organic By Nature
INDUSTRY
Healthcare
HQ
Los Angeles County, California
YEAR FOUNDED
1993
EMPLOYEES
-
Result
As a result, the company pays a fraction of the cost of what they were paying for their old PBX system. “We saved about $27,000 in upfront hardware and set up costs with RingCentral versus our old PBX system. On an ongoing basis, we save about $1,000 a month compared to our prior service,” said Merz.
Not only does Organic By Nature save a significant sum of money but RingCentral saves Merz precious time: “I save about 8 hours a month with RingCentral because employees can now set up their own phone system themselves. Before RingCentral, a couple of times a week, I would have to make little changes like go into the directory to change a last name when someone got married, or change forwarding settings for someone’s voicemail. When people moved from one desk to another, I had to go into the phone closet and switch the wires so their extension followed them. The old wiring in our building wasn’t labeled in any useful way so this almost always meant that I had to trace the wires each time to find the right ones. With RingCentral, employees can change their own name in the directory. When they move to a new desk, they just pick up their phone, plug it into the Internet cable on their new desk and it just works.”