Convergent Helps Red Wing Shoe Company Slash Travel Costs and Improve Collaboration with Microsoft Unified Communications Technology

The SituationThe Red Wing Shoe Company is one of the world’s most respected manufacturers of durable, safe and comfortable work boots and shoes. The company also offers casual shoes and premium outdoor footwear. With multiple facilities in the United States and a presence in Japan and Europe, Red Wing employs hundreds of craftspeople making thousands of pairs of shoes by hand every day.

Red Wing’s workforce depends on 450 corporate PCs and about 400 devices in company-owned brick-and-mortar retail stores. Among these users are product development teams and regional sales teams that frequently needed to fly to company headquarters in Red Wing, MN, or to the organization’s many retail shops and expanding overseas offices. These trips consumed a significant amount of the teams’ time and were an expensive part of Red Wing’s business operations, but seemed necessary to carry out collaboration within the company’s sprawling marketing base.

Red Wing IT Architecture and Operations Director Mike Cleary sought a more efficient way for staff to collaborate while at the same time reducing the heavy travel costs. The company had been using Microsoft Exchange 2003, which it implemented on its own, but Red Wing Shoe Company’s IT team knew they were not using Exchange to its full potential. Staff did not have remote access to their Microsoft Office applications, such as e-mail and calendars, when they were on the road, and Cleary’s vision was for Red Wing personnel to be able to “work wherever you are, whenever you want.”

Convergent has been a long-time technology partner of Red Wing Shoe Company, working together on the technology in Red Wing’s data center and providing service and support. Red Wing’s architecture and operations teams consulted with Convergent and discovered that Microsoft’s Unified Communications technology would be the perfect solution to meet his objectives.

The Convergent solution:• Microsoft Exchange 2007• Microsoft Office • Communications Server• NET VX Gateway and • Integration into existing • Avaya PBX• Access to Convergent’s • 24x7 UC Support Center

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“With Microsoft Unified Communications, Convergent is offering us 21st century collaborations tools that will work very well with the longstanding creativity and quality that Red Wing has built on. This new technology allows us to become much more efficient and provide better service to our customers.”

– Mike ClearyDirector, IT Architecture & Operations

Red Wing Shoe Company

The SolutionIn December 2008, the team began working with Convergent on a plan to implement Unified Communications throughout Red Wing Shoe Company. The first step was to upgrade Red Wing’s Exchange server to the 2007 version. Then, in the first quarter of 2009, Convergent added Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (OCS), a platform that would enable Red Wing to boost its communication and collaboration capabilities tremendously through:

• Display of each user’s “Enhanced Presence,” an indicator showing who is online and • available for messages, calls or conferences

• Desktop sharing

• Instant messaging

• Audio and/or video conferencing

• Enterprise Voice, Microsoft’s voice-over-IP solution that brings unprecedented flexibility • to digital communications

As part of the implementation, Convergent activated the Office Outlook Web Access (OWA) feature of Exchange that, through the Web, gives mobile workers nearly all the features of the Microsoft Outlook application on their PC desktops. Additionally, the team also implemented the Outlook Anywhere feature to eliminate the need for a virtual private network (VPN) connection in order to access email and calendar. Now employees who were on the road, anywhere in the world, could log into OWA to retrieve, read and send e-mail and attachments, view and update their calendars, track their tasks and call up information on contacts.

Next, Convergent provided Red Wing with Microsoft LiveMeeting video and audio conferencing, so that individuals could see and talk with each other directly through their PCs. Moreover, with OCS, any Enterprise Voice phone call could be immediately escalated to an audio conference or a LiveMeeting video conference with the click of a button, easily adding participants in the conference as necessary.

Half a dozen Red Wing locations – a warehouse in Salt Lake City, plants in Potosi, MO., and Houston, TX, a tannery in Red Wing, and other facilities – were equipped with Microsoft’s RoundTable, a videoconferencing technology that provides 360-degree panoramic video of everyone at a conference table with a camera that automatically tracks the speakers. The RoundTable displays images of meeting participants, helping remote workers and those in the conference room feel that they all are at a single table, talking face to face. Red Wing Shoe Company deployed webcams to individual employees – mostly remote and mobile workers – and, as old laptops are phased out, they are replaced with devices that are equipped with integrated cameras and USB headsets.

For telephony, Convergent integrated OCS with Red Wing’s existing Avaya PBX system. Convergent had made a strategic investment in talented staff with a long history of working with phone systems. With its telephony and infrastructure experts, Convergent has been able to blend the best of both technology worlds. Now, since all communications are digital, Red Wing employees have the option of hearing their e-mail read or reading their voicemail and can choose to respond in written, voice and video communication.

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Why ConvergentCleary cites two important advantages of Microsoft Unified Communications over competing systems: its level of integration with Microsoft Office and its usability. He says that the familiar look and feel of Unified Communications really cuts down the amount of training required and has helped the internal adoption rate.

“I had previously evaluated other communications systems,” Cleary says, “including the IM and presence capabilities of Avaya and Cisco. I came back again and again to Microsoft. So we didn’t spend a lot of time on re-evaluating technology once we had approval to implement a unified communications solution. We knew Microsoft’s was the right product.”

Furthermore, Red Wing Shoe Company had great confidence in Convergent. “We’ve been very pleased with the expertise that Convergent brings to the table,” Cleary reports. “We’ve had great results on several fronts with them.”

Convergent owner John Dusek notes that Convergent has been working with Red Wing for nearly five years, beginning with the company’s request for consultation on storage networks. “It’s been a great partnership all the way through,” Dusek says.

Red Wing has a relatively small IT staff charged with servicing a dynamic organization, but its onsite resources are limited. “We lean heavily on Convergent to come to us with the expertise to implement new technology,” Cleary says. “OCS was very new to us, and we needed to have it integrated with our Avaya phone switch. We connected with Convergent because we were looking for a partner to do a multiphase project and walk us through a well-paced effort where we could start small and then move on to more complex capabilities.”

Convergent’s consulting style fit well with that need. “We ask customers what they want to do, their goals, and then integrate the right technology,” Dusek says. “Exchange was a good building block, and OCS had features above and beyond those of Exchange that could benefit Red Wing day to day. We put in trials and the user community grabbed it and ran with it.”

The Results“With our staff being relatively new to technology, we didn’t expect them to adopt Unified Communications as fast as they did,” Cleary recalls. “They surprised us.”

Traveling teams report that they especially like the voice-commands capability of Exchange and OCS. “They like hands-free capability in the car,” Cleary says. “We are a fair distance from Minneapolis, where a lot of our people live and have long commutes. Unified Communications gives them a chance to get a head start on their day and finish a few things on the way home at night with voice commands.”

The impact of Microsoft Unified Communications from Convergent has been considerable for Red Wing Shoe Company in a number of areas:

• Cost savings. Cleary reports, “Within the first two months after deployment of OCS and Unified • Communications, we stopped calculating cost savings because it already had captured the cost • of implementation. The ROI was incredibly high.”

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• Time Savings. The presence capabilities of Unified Communications enables Red Wing to save • a great amount of time by knowing where and when people are located and their availability. • Sales and product teams gain days of available time because they no longer need to spend • so much time traveling to meetings, which now can be conducted by videoconference.

• Company growth. The technology that OCS brings to the desktop is the type of advanced • capability that high-level college students entering the workforce are looking for. Red Wing • therefore has an advantage over many competitors in attracting the best and brightest talent • by meeting their expectations.

• Improved accuracy. Because the company now can collaborate globally and visually display • documents for editing and discussion in real time, everyone understands the current state of • project development.

• Reduced IT administration. Unified Communications has simplified the work of Red Wing’s • IT department. For example, Cleary observes, “We are doing renovations in our corporate • offices, which means we are shifting the workforce from one floor to another. Having to • relocate staff within the building is much easier with OCS Enterprise Voice, because we don’t • have to move their phone lines and re-patch. People can pick up and move wherever they are.” • From a day-to-day perspective, Unified Communications gives IT a more simplified, consolidated • view of the company’s telecommunications and collaboration tools.

• Better planning. The collaboration features of Unified Communications make the company • much more efficient at doing its planning. Sales teams can have 20 or 30 members online to • look at quarterly forecasts, working in real time, to make adjustments in their plans.

• Improved supply-chain management. Part of Red Wing’s process now is to ask suppliers• about the kind of collaboration tools they have and to see if they can be combined with Red • Wing’s technology to gain the presence feature and better integrate with the supplier community.

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Sales:E: sales@convergent- solutions.com P: (952) 303-7100

Support:E: support@convergent- solutions.comP: (952) 303-7100