Scot Industries
“World’s unequaled supplier of specialty bar and tube products”
Large Distributed FacetPhone System Unifying a Dozen Locations
Scot Industries (www.scotindustries.com) is a manufacturer of specialty tubing products with a dozen factory, lab and office locations across North America. Scot has built a strong niche in the honing business and develops, designs, and builds most of its processes, tooling and machinery. When our installer was on site at the company headquarters in Lone Star Texas, he said the honing equipment makes a really cool sound!
In 2005, Scot was in need of a new phone system. They were looking for an IP-PBX that could unify the 9 locations they had at that time, end long distance phone charges for calls between locations and provide computer telephony integration with their accounting software. We designed a FacetPhone system that would have all locations on a single unified phone system. Calls between branches would just be data traffic on their VPN network. The system would run on the server in Lone Star but all other large locations would have a backup server. If the server in Lone Star had a problem, one of the servers at another branch could take over the whole phone system. If one branch lost their connectivity to Lone Star, the local server could takeover the single branch. This FacetPhone system linking the initial 9 locations was installed in 2006.
Scot has continued to grow since we initially installed the system. New branches are easily installed by Scot staff without the need for us to send an installer. Each branch can have its own local lines that are controlled by the main server in Lone Star. If there is a problem with the local lines at a branch, people there can use the lines at another branch so there is not much impact from the local outage. Scot has evolved to using an MPLS network to connect most locations with a few smaller locations still using a VPN connection to headquarters. The server in Lone Star that runs the phone system for the entire enterprise has now been migrated to a virtualized Linux system.
With employees spread out over North America, FacetPhone’s user interface showing everybody’s status helps everyone avoid “phone tag”. Scot employees use the enterprise instant messaging feature extensively for quick chats.
FacetCorp has provided Scot’s business communication needs for many years now. We look forward to continuing this role for many more years to come.
