Replacing a Legacy Phone System for a Regional Distributor

The Challenge

The company is a building materials distributor with 65 employees across a head office in Laval and three warehouses in Quebec and Ontario. Their Nortel PBX system had been out of vendor support for years, and replacement parts were sourced from eBay.

Dispatchers at the warehouses used personal cell phones because the desk phones couldn’t forward calls or integrate with anything. Customer calls were routinely missed during shift changes, and there was no call logging — when a customer said “I called three times,” nobody could verify it. The office manager was spending $4,200 per month across three different telecom providers with no consolidated billing.

Our Approach

We deployed our own VoIP platform — built and operated by us, not a white-label reseller service. Each location received pre-configured desk phones and every dispatcher got a mobile app that replaced their personal phone for work calls.

The system included auto-attendant for after-hours routing, call recording for order verification, and voicemail-to-email for the warehouse teams. We integrated the platform with their existing Microsoft Teams setup so office staff could make and receive calls directly from Teams.

The rollout was staggered — head office first, then one warehouse per week. We ported all existing phone numbers with no service interruption. Each location received on-site training tailored to their workflow: dispatchers learned the mobile app, office staff learned the Teams integration, and managers learned the analytics dashboard.

The Outcome

The monthly telecom bill dropped from $4,200 to $2,100. Missed calls during shift changes dropped by over 60% — dispatchers now see missed call notifications on their mobile app and can return them immediately. The operations manager runs a weekly call volume report that has helped them adjust staffing during peak ordering periods. The entire project was completed in 10 business days.