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Storage Battery Systems: If We Hadn't Had RingCentral, We Would've Been in a World of Hurt

Storage Battery Systems migrates from a legacy Mitel PBX to RingCentral — completing the cutover two weeks before COVID-19 sent 75% of their workforce home, and discovering video conferencing capabilities that changed how the organization communicates entirely.

The Challenge

Storage Battery Systems was expanding across multiple geographically dispersed locations and needed a communications platform that could grow with them — their legacy Mitel PBX couldn't scale, couldn't support remote workers, and wasn't built for the multi-location environment SBS was building toward.

The Solution

CTPros guided SBS through the platform evaluation and implemented RingCentral — completing go-live at the end of February 2020, just weeks before COVID-19 sent 75% of the company home and validated the timing more dramatically than anyone expected.

About Storage Battery Systems

Storage Battery Systems (SBS) has been manufacturing direct current (DC) products since 1915. Headquartered in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, SBS employs over 200 people and has established itself as an industry leader in batteries and chargers for forklift trucks, battery packs for industrial and consumer applications, and customized power solutions. With a partnership with Louisiana-based stationary power company Nolan Power Group, SBS serves clients across the country — and with expansion plans underway, the company needed communications infrastructure that could scale across new office locations without complexity.

A PBX That Couldn't Scale and a Workforce That Was Starting to Spread Out

Bill ZumMallen, SBS's IT Director, had been managing a Mitel on-premise PBX that was increasingly mismatched with where the company was headed. SBS was expanding — adding office locations across multiple states — and the legacy system couldn't accommodate that growth without adding complexity and cost at every step. Managing communications across a geographically dispersed workforce on an on-premise platform wasn't sustainable.

ZumMallen reached out to CTPros, whom he had worked with previously, to help find the right path forward. The goal was a cloud platform that could unify communications across multiple locations, support the company's expansion plans, and give the various departments — from sales to operations to remote workers — the tools they actually needed.

Migration Complete — Just in Time

Scott Dressel, Major Account Representative at CTPros, led the engagement — working with ZumMallen to determine the right migration strategy and identify the features and tools that would serve SBS's departments as the company grew. RingCentral was selected for its ability to unify communications across multiple locations, support remote workers, and scale as new offices were added without requiring on-premise infrastructure at each site.

CTPros managed the implementation, and ZumMallen made a critical decision before go-live: train everyone before the cutover. Using RingCentral's online resources — self-paced tutorials, instructor-led courses, and the Glip messaging and collaboration tools — SBS employees were trained on the platform before the old system was switched off. Within two weeks of go-live, nearly everyone at SBS was comfortable with the new platform.

Go-live was completed at the end of February 2020.

A World of Hurt — Avoided

Two weeks after go-live, COVID-19 sent 75% of the SBS workforce home. Because everyone had already been trained on RingCentral before the cutover, the transition to remote work happened with minimal disruption. The platform that was purchased to support multi-location expansion became the infrastructure that kept SBS operational when the rest of the world was scrambling.

The video conferencing capabilities turned out to be the most significant unexpected benefit. SBS used video in three distinct ways that changed how the organization operates:

Board meetings: 16 board members who previously flew in the night before in-person meetings switched to virtual. The remote meetings were described as some of the best board meetings the organization had ever held — eliminating travel costs and lost productivity while improving the quality of the discussion.

Employee town halls: Nearly 200 employees attended SBS's first virtual town hall — also considered one of the best meetings of its kind the company had run.

Virtual happy hours: SBS used video to keep employees personally connected during a period of sustained remote work — creating informal touchpoints that built relationships across a distributed team.

ZumMallen's assessment was simple: the training made the difference. Having 75% of the workforce working from home would have been a much harder problem if they hadn't already been trained on the platform before COVID hit.

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