August 14, 2012, 8:31 AM — Hendrickson International Corporation is a leading global supplier of truck, tractor, bus and recreational vehicle suspension and heavy-duty spring components to the commercial transportation industry.
CIO Rick Johnson will readily describe both the company's products and its manufacturing processes as innovative and state of the art. But when he was asked to categorize the privately held, 95-year-old company's outlook on the use of cutting-edge IT products and services, he had to say it was rather conservative overall.
But Johnson, who has led the Hendrickson IT team for five years, said cloud-based unified communications as a service (UCaaS) was not a hard sell at Hendrickson because it both provided an economical upgrade to the company's outdated and cumbersome Fujitsu PBX and paved the way for more plausible cloud-based applications across the company in the future.
Hendrickson has close to 20 manufacturing, customer service and product development centers in the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Spain, Australia and the Pacific Rim. It also has locations in New Zealand, Thailand, Brazil and China.
About a year ago, Hendrickson sought to enhance communication and collaboration among its distributed workforce by moving off its antiquated, expensive, premises-based communications system, because the system offered only limited applications, too little in terms of integration capabilities, and no growth capacity. The company also needed to replace legacy analog telephone lines and wanted to utilize videoconferencing between offices and manufacturing facilities as well as with customers, business partners and sales prospects.
After a due-diligence comparison of the options, Hendrickson ran with ThinkingSuite, a service offered by Thinking Phones Networks -- which Hendrickson pairs with Polycom desktop phones and video bridges. ThinkingSuite combines a powerful business analytics engine for process and workflow visibility, third-party application integration to help merge previously stand-alone systems, and best-in-class UC applications including voice, video, mobility, analytics, IM/presence, contact center, unified messaging and audio/Web collaboration.
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