Adams Brothers, Inc.

Overview

Adams Brothers Inc. was established in Birmingham, Alabama in 1903. The company has grown a wide presence in the southeast, including seven locations in the states of Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Florida. Adams Brothers primarily services major chain restaurants by providing fresh fruits and vegetables. A few of these companies are Outback Steakhouse, Olive Garden, and Arby's. They have over 250 employees and are still growing. Their latest expansion was in Destin, Florida where they opened a new office and distribution warehouse.

Challenge

When Adams Brothers began looking for a new telephony solution they had several motivating factors. Three situations needed to be addressed: First, they were having problems with their proprietary phone systems, so they needed to find a more reliable platform. Second, they needed a broader feature set, including inter-office connectivity and higher voicemail density. Finally, by acquiring new offices they had inherited a vast array of mismatched phone systems from several different manufacturers, so they needed a common platform. Adams Brothers' customers call in orders to their local branch. Most of the orders were left as voice mail at night when the customers were closing the shop. Typically 250-300 voice mail messages were left daily at each of their larger locations. Birmingham, their largest location, was on their second NEC phone system. They had outgrown the prior one. However, the new NEC system had a series of problems. The voice mail hard drive failed, two voicemail cards needed replacement, and the NEC service providers were ineffective. Their need for a broader feature set was a common story. The high cost of adding the features and functionality at the time of purchase prevented the company from purchasing a system into which they could grow. The lack of an IVR, conferencing capabilities, voicemail density, and especially VoIP was inefficient. A mismatched telephony platform created several issues. There was no way for the IT staff at the Birmingham Headquarters to centrally administer changes to the branch systems. It was nearly impossible for Adams Brothers' small IT department to maintain these dissimilar systems spread across the Southeast. They relied on an expensive support network of several different companies. They soon realized that they must approach this problem in a new way.

Solution

NEC was the incumbent. The quote provided by the NEC representative for a new system for the Birmingham office was between $30,000 and $40,000 for a key-hybrid system. The more robust NEC PBX system would have been over $50,000 including phones. This system still would not have offered all the features that were required. VoIP in particular was important to the company for toll-bypass between the different branch locations. Jeff Roberts, Adams Brothers' Director of IT Services, would not accept this as an option. Jeff, having some experience with Linux, was a member of the Birmingham Linux users group where Mark Spencer, the president of Digium, gave a presentation on Asterisk. Unfortunately, Jeff missed it, but some of his colleagues that had attended told him what they had heard. Jeff was immediately interested and began researching the project.

Implementation

In August of 2003 Jeff downloaded version 0.7 of the Asterisk software. Shortly thereafter he was able to acquire some line interface hardware from Digium. After several months of testing in the IT department lab, rollout began in January of 2004. Adams Brothers decided to phase Asterisk in one office at a time. The Jackson, Mississippi office seemed to be the obvious choice for the first installation as it had the smallest number of phones at the time, and the existing system was "on its last legs," according to Jeff. Rollout out of the initial office was handled single-handedly by Jeff over the span of about two months (on and off) while he learned more about the Asterisk system. According to Jeff, "each deployment is a little easier." More recent deployments have been completed by one or two individuals in a few days time. The second rollout was at the corporate headquarters in Birmingham. Here the Asterisk system was deployed side-by-side with the NEC system over the period of a few weeks. This gave the IT department a chance to train users on the new system and, "the flexibility of Asterisk made the changeover easier," by allowing Adams Brothers to incrementally move service to the Digium | Asterisk solution. The NEC system was removed from service one Sunday, so that there was no service interruption for the end users. Over time, Adams Brothers has moved each existing office to a solution based on Asterisk software and Digium hardware. Adams has acquired several existing new locations over the past several years, and now has a policy of immediately replacing any existing telephony system with Asterisk. The most recent rollout was at the newly acquired Destin, Florida office. The office uses a single server with a Digium two-span T1 interface card. An ADTRAN TA-750 modular channel bank is used to connect to backup analog lines and devices requiring FXS connectivity such as cordless phones and fax machines. Adams Brothers continued their practice of using the Cisco 7960 in this office due to the quality of the units. Implementation of the Destin system from start to finish required three man-days to complete.

Results

Adams Brothers has been successfully using Asterisk as their primary phone system for nearly two years. They have improved the feature set offered to users, increased flexibility to create custom telephony applications, and, most importantly, greatly improved the reliability of their mission critical voicemail systems. By using Asterisk, the small in-house IT department has been able to deploy and maintain all internal systems, saving thousands on third-party telecom contractor expenses. Additionally, elimination of toll charges for interoffice communications have saved the company tens of thousands of dollars since the installation of Asterisk. However, Adams Brothers benefits the most from Asterisk's power, flexibility, and programmability. Easily creating applications for Asterisk using standard programming languages such as Perl and PHP allows the internal IT department to create many custom telephony applications internally, something that was simply impossible with previous solutions. The power and flexibility of Asterisk allowed Adams Brothers to keep their business running during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina which knocked several locations off-line for over two weeks. Unfortunately, the service provider's network operations center was in New Orleans and was severely damaged. During that time, Adams Brothers used additional data connectivity from BellSouth to link servers in branch locations to their Birmingham headquarters, from which they provided PSTN connectivity. Of course, the ability to keep their locations operational and taking orders saved Adams Brothers thousands of dollars in what otherwise would have been lost revenue.