ABP UK
Top european beef processor ABP UK saves money and improves operations with RingCentral
£↓
removing ISDNs and on-prem hardware lowered costs significantly
15
UK locations connected in one cloud communications environment
0
outages with RingCentral (after suffering roughly one each week)
With RingCentral, we’ve improved our communications infrastructure in so many ways. We’ve gone from weekly outages to a never-down phone system. We’ve gone from 15 on-prem PBX servers to one cloud solution with no hardware to manage. And we’ve gained visibility and business intelligence we never had before. All that—and we’re saving money on telecom, too.
Richard Baran
Service Support and Operations Manager
Voted UK’s Food Manufacturer of the Year
For more than 40 years, ABP UK—a division of ABP Food Group—has been helping to feed millions of people around the world. The company is one of Europe’s top processors of high-quality beef, lamb, and plant-based food products, working with more than 13,000 farmers across the UK.
The company has built such a quality organisation, in fact, that ABP UK was named Food Manufacturer of the Year in 2018 at the industry’s prestigious Food Manufacture Excellence Awards.
Legacy telephony was undermining operations
One of the traits that enabled ABP UK to become an industry leader has been the company’s use of cutting-edge technology to process quality food products so efficiently. In 2014, for example, ABP UK became the country’s first meat producer ever to introduce VIA (Visual Imaging Analysis) grading, to assess meat quality with unparalleled accuracy.
So Richard Baran, Service Support Operations Manager for ABP UK, points out the irony of a company widely known for its innovative uses of technology still using standard telephone lines and outdated phone hardware to communicate with colleagues and customers.
“We were implementing digital transformation initiatives across the organisation, but we were still running all of our 15 sites on ISDN lines and aging PBX systems,” Richard explains. “And because these systems were so outdated, they were crashing frequently. On average, one site would lose phone service about once a week.”
Guided by a great technology advisor
Fortunately, Richard notes, ABP UK did not have to conduct its research into enterprise-caliber unified communications providers alone. His team had expert guidance at every step from the company’s consultancy partner.
UCAdvisor proved a tremendous help to us in the tender process and in giving us a full understanding of each vendor’s capabilities. And when we could see what all the UC providers had to offer—and at what costs—side by side, RingCentral was by far the best choice.
Richard Baran
Service Support and Operations Manager
INDUSTRY
Food and beverage manufacturing
HQ
Birmingham, United Kingdom
YEAR FOUNDED
1981
EMPLOYEES
6,000+
Why RingCentral was the clear choice
Richard explains that during the company’s thorough research process, aided by UCAdvisor, two key factors made RingCentral the obvious selection for ABP UK.
“The first thing that impressed us was the cost savings we would realise with RingCentral,” he says. “We reviewed all the vendors’ proposals. And although replacing our legacy infrastructure with each of these cloud vendors would’ve represented some reduction in our telecom costs, RingCentral offered the biggest cost savings.”
But the other reason, Richard adds, proved to be the deciding factor:
More than any vendor, RingCentral took time to learn about ABP UK and what we’d need from a communications perspective. It was clear RingCentral’s Project Management Team had done their homework, cared about making this work for us, and wanted to proactively help well beyond implementation. And all of those things have proven true.
Richard Baran
Service Support and Operations Manager
Improving operations across the business
As Richard explains, ABP UK has found numerous operational benefits from rolling out RingCentral to all employees at all of the company’s 15 UK locations. The most immediate improvement, he says, was reliability.
“With RingCentral, we found our outages went from frequent to nonexistent,” he says. “Because we standardised our telephony on RingCentral’s highly reliable cloud system, we never worry anymore about a location losing all phone service for an extended period, which used to occupy a lot of IT’s time. Now everything just works.”
Another business-changing benefit, Richard notes, is gaining a level of insight and business intelligence the company never had with its legacy phone environment.
“RingCentral’s reporting gives our managers visibility into what’s happening with their departments’ call volume, their teams’ performance, and changing trends that we could never have had with our old, disjointed infrastructure.”
He continues: “When it comes to our own IT Service Desk, for example, we can now monitor all of our team’s phone activity through the reports—number of calls per hour or day, peak call times, call-answer rate, average time to resolution, whatever. That’s really helping us with resourcing and continually improving our team’s service to our users.”
Consolidating services and saving money
Richard also points out that because RingCentral provides a unified platform, his IT team is beginning to consolidate ABP UK’s other communication services into their RingCentral environment.
“RingCentral is an all-in-one solution, which means our employees have one app for business calls, meetings, texts, and other forms of communication. We’re now ending an audio-conferencing service we’ve been paying for—because RingCentral has that capability too. Consolidating apps like this will make hosting and joining meetings more convenient for our employees—and also save ABP UK even more on our IT communication costs.”
What I’ve been most pleased with about RingCentral is how much work the team puts into keeping in touch with us, making sure we have everything we need, and even offering suggestions about how we can leverage the services we already have in RingCentral to improve our workflows and processes. That’s not a vendor; that’s a partner.
Richard Baran
Service Support and Operations Manager