Case Study

Europe’s largest fresh produce provider and distributor, Total Produce plc has over 4,800 employees operating out of over 120 locations in 23 countries.

It has 12 sites around Ireland, including one in Dundalk, County Louth, where the roots of the company can be traced back over 150 years to a family business.

The global headquarters is based in Dublin where Director of Information Technology, Tony O'Halloran, is responsible for an IT roadmap that will deliver value to customers and the business alike. Part of this strategy is to consolidate core technology services and identify a partner capable of delivering the high quality network services required for both the Irish and global organisation.

“What we liked about Three was their ability to support our local business at the same time as grow our global infrastructure,” explains Tony O'Halloran. “It very quickly became apparent that we had found a like-minded partner with the expertise and drive to deliver what we needed.”

Solution

When Total Produce selected Three to operate its mobile service, communication blackspots quickly became a thing of the past. Three installed signal boosters to improve coverage in some of the company’s more remote branches and worked with Total Produce to quickly resolve any issues as they arose.

Having experienced the mobile coverage and customer service, Total Produce began to discuss other strategic opportunities with Three. Total Produce has grown fast through acquisition and wanted to consolidate and replace some of its legacy technology services, including fixed telephony.

Three proposed its cloud based telephony solution 3Connect and Total Produce has already begun to implement this in locations across Ireland and the UK delivering some key benefits.

"With 3Connect we are able to decommission our legacy telephone systems quickly while at the same time delivering better service and experience to our employees and customers. The 3Connect service will enable us to reduce our costs and take advantage of the rich feature set including voice conferencing, virtual fax, fixed mobile convergence and free internal dial plans across our UK and Ireland footprint," said O'Halloran.

Additional innovative solutions are now being discussed with Three. Total Produce is currently rolling out a wireless handheld solution to help automate branch trading operations and Three have proved to be an important partner in designing the network solution. By providing an infrastructure with the ability to scale across multiple locations and having network monitoring in place, Three can become the single point of contact for network related issues.

Results

By supporting day to day business operations, Three's mobile network coverage has already proved to be a reliable and cost effective solution for the multiple sites located across Ireland. It has been ably supported by strong customer service and proactive account management, important foundations in an increasingly close partnership that continues to deliver benefits.

The 3Connect solution has provided a platform to migrate away from the traditional on-premise PABX solutions which require physical equipment and on-site engineers, the only on-premise requirement is for IP handsets.

Internal calls between different locations are "on net" and free because they use the internet and not the traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN) and because the system is cloud based, it's easy to roll-out and expand the solution into new locations.

Total Produce’s long-term strategy is to collaborate with key partners to deliver core technology services across the group that will drive a more efficient and cost-effective global infrastructure. Three are an example of this strategy in operation, working with Total Produce to design and deliver solutions across different platforms and geographies.

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