Olson Manufacturing & Distribution, Inc.

Olson Manufacturing Consolidates Multi-site Telecommunications with LightEdge VoIP and IP WAN

Overview
Olson Manufacturing & Distribution, Inc. is a leader in the plastic distribution and fabrication industries. Founded over eighty years ago to develop and produce drafting products, Olson Manufacturing & Distribution, Inc. has expanded to include the distribution, fabrication and machining of plastic sheet, rod, and tube. While primarily servicing industrial accounts in the Midwest with locations in Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska, Olson has recently developed a national presence due to an expanding customer base. Olson began doing business with LightEdge Solutions as an Internet and Wide Area Networking customer. As their business needs changed, Olson found that their telecommunications system was not meeting the needs of their growing business, and turned to LightEdge for a solution.

Challenge
With three offices and more than 50 employees located throughout the Midwest, Olson was convinced that they could improve upon the systems they were using in their three offices and simplify some of the processes for making changes and additions. Each of their three sites operated separate legacy PBX systems, which created a lack of integration between offices and made simple functions like moves, adds, and changes time-consuming and expensive. Due to these mounting issues and ever-increasing costs for maintenance and monthly long distance charges, Olson was compelled to review and consider alternatives to legacy systems.

Olson decided to review their current telecommunications systems and associated vendors to look for areas where service could be improved, costs could be reduced, or vendors could be consolidated. Olson reviewed several vendors in each market, looking at packages and pricing for both traditional and VoIP solutions. While many vendors offered VoIP packages with basic features, LightEdge Hosted PBX provided all of the cost, feature and support elements that Olson Manufacturing would require from their new system. In addition, because of their long history as a satisfied LightEdge customer, Olson felt certain that LightEdge would provide the same level of personal support and service that they were accustomed to as a wide area networking customer.

The LightEdge Solution
The LightEdge Hosted PBX service proved to offer more features at a better overall cost than the bids from competitors. Olson found that LightEdge Hosted PBX required no PBX equipment purchase, and could be obtained on a per-user, per-month fee basis. This allowed Olson Manufacturing to purchase seats for their current needs, and then scale seamlessly on-demand as they add employees. And with all calls between offices routed through the LightEdge private IP network, Olson was able to virtually eliminate monthly long distance charges for all calls between their locations.

The LightEdge Hosted PBX system also improved Olson's integration between offices by providing extension dialing between the locations, and the ability to have a single receptionist answer and manage calls for each of the three locations. With the addition of the VoIP system, Olson's employees enjoy enhanced calling features such as e-mail delivery of voice mail, find me/follow me and other mobile office features. Overall, Olson found that moving to LightEdge's Hosted PBX VoIP service helped to reduce the total cost of their telecommunications system while providing rich features that enhance the efficiency of their business.