Avaya Builds Solid Communications Infrastructure for Berglund Construction

Avaya IP Office Gives Chicago Builder Reliable, Scalable VoIP Foundation

Founded in 1911, Berglund Construction is a family-owned company based in South Chicago. Company lore describes the Berglund Construction founder catching the street car early every morning to get to job sites, armed with just a ladder, a shovel and a bucket. A lot has changed in the last 100 years. Today the company employees some 350 people, and is recognized as one of the ‘Top 400 Contractors in the US’ by construction-industry weekly Engineering News-Record. It has two offices in Chicago, one in Indiana, and its employees can be found at job sites in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin.

Berglund’s projects run the gamut from boutique jobs to renovations of iconic university buildings and Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium. The company is probably best known for its construction of the Skydeck Ledge at the Willis Tower – a glass balcony extending four feet off of the 103rd floor of the tower.

Until recently, this industry-leading company was relying on an aging phone system plagued with frequent outages. As Carol Hall, Business Operations Manager for Berglund Construction, explains, it wasn’t meeting the company’s growing need for remote field collaboration.

“For a construction company, collaboration is very important,” she says. “A 25-year-old phone system that we had to reset an average of twice a week simply didn’t support that.”

Hall knew the company was overdue for an upgrade and that it needed a feature-rich VoIP solution to support communications with the field. Berglund decided to go with Avaya IP Office Platform™, and now has a reliable, scalable business communications solution.

Scalability Made Simple

Avaya IP Office is being used by employees at all of Berglund’s office locations and on its job sites. The company is leveraging the scalability of the IP Office solution in a new and unique way: rolling it out to its large job sites where Berglund has long-term projects.

“We have a really big job site in the Champaign-Urbana area, and we’re setting it up like it’s another office,” explains Hall. “Instead of spending the money to have hard lines run to the facility, or relying on cell phones and hot spots, we’re going to use our IP Office. In fact, that’s one of the reasons we went with the Avaya solution: we knew we’d be able to utilize it at big job sites.”

Hall anticipates that voice quality and overall collaboration at the site will get a boost now that they’re not dependent on cell phones and hot spots.

“It’s a really, really big project,” she says. “So, there’ll be a lot of integration and collaboration.”

Hall found the solution very easy to scale for deployment at the job site. “It was not challenging at all. The next time we do it, we should be able to do it completely on our own without having to involve our vendor,” she says.

A Reliable Solution

Hall also reports that IP Office is saving the company money, but as important, it has provided much-needed reliability.

“Not only have our phone rates gone down, the improved reliability has been a great part of the solution,” she says. “We can communicate seamlessly without worrying about phone outages.”

Given the nature of the construction business, at times more than half of the Berglund workforce is not in an office. This makes the IP Office mobile twinning functionality invaluable to the company.

“The twinning feature is great. It makes our employees more accessible, and they like it because they can give out their desk number, not their personal cell phone number,” Hall says.

Hall also appreciates the connectivity offered by the solution. She, along with the company owner and the company CFO, move among the three offices frequently. They are able to simply plug in their extensions at any office and access the phone system.

Growing Collaboration

Large, long-term jobs are not uncommon for Berglund Construction, and Hall anticipates rolling out the IP Office solution to those sites moving forward. In addition, she is interested in deploying Avaya Scopia video conferencing to augment collaboration between the offices and the job sites.