Total Produce plc, a leading fresh produce provider with over 100 locations across Europe, has made significant savings in travel costs and boosted productivity. Joe Fallon, IT Director with Total Produce explains more.
The company had already been using video conferencing for many years but had decided it was time to look again at its strategy. Now they had a choice between buying a system to serve each office at a cost of several thousand Euros or using a Cloud-based service like VuCall. In Ireland VuCall’s services are marketed as CompleteView by Complete Telecom, the Dublin based managed network and telecoms services provider. A service delivered over the Cloud removes the need to invest in expensive hardware and software licenses as well as reducing the support and operating costs. “I was a bit sceptical, but we tried it out and it worked a treat” says Fallon. “Charges are also very reasonable and are applied on a per user basis according to usage,” he adds.
“Using CompleteView we can still engage in face-to-face meetings with a very natural, TV-like experience. We investigated a number of potential suppliers for the service and CompleteView stands out as it delivers true business-quality contact to the desktop or conference room, along with an intuitive setup and the ability to easily add or remove users.” Fallon adds that the video quality is much higher than free online tools, which wouldn’t have been suitable in a business environment.
Total Produce expects to extend the service to 15 locations across the UK, Continental Europe and Ireland by year end. Scaling up the service for new users in new locations is as easy as calling up Complete Telecom who will implement the changes within 8 business hours, without any customer IT involvement or upfront cost.
Unlike the previous videoconferencing system, which needed three ISDN lines per site and separate conference rooms, the new Cloud-based service connects easily to a standard laptop from a broadband internet connection. Obviously, it depends on your bandwidth but I’ve even done calls from home over a DSL connection,” Fallon says. “I wanted it to be that you just click on it, and it just works.”
While Fallon still makes regular visits in person to his software development team based in Birmingham, the video conferencing system makes contact much easier and more frequent. “We can manage better, as opposed to just cost saving,” is how he describes it. “We get information quicker and if there’s a problem, we can have a conversation with the group within minutes.”
Neil Wisdom, sales director with Complete Telecom, comments “While the use of video in place of face-to-face meetings requires a cultural shift in organisations, it delivers not only cost benefits but improved business continuity even in the face of unforeseen events such as recent airline disruptions, volcano eruptions and swine flu outbreaks. We believe that the availability of cloud-based services will drive strong adoption of telepresence technologies in the Irish market.”
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