Stemmer Distribution Group Takes a Bite Out of Costs while Improving Experiences

Centralizing Communications at the Stemmer Distribution Group Reduces Costs by Half

Founded in 1978, the Stemmer Distribution Group is the largest distributor of dental products in France. It provides all health professionals in the dental sector with consumables, laboratory products, equipment, and repair services. To best serve their customers, the employees must remain easily and quickly reachable. Hence the search for a new, more modern communication solution that meets all the needs of reachability and mobility.

At the end of 2020, Stemmer Distribution launched a program to harmonize the communications solutions of the group's entities with the objective of modernizing and simplifying its architecture and rationalizing costs while improving the user experience.

Within the framework of this program, the Stemmer group called upon Artelcom to carry out a technical and functional audit of the entire existing communications infrastructure in France. The conclusions of this audit identified various strategies for the evolution of the communications solutions for the 250 employees spread over six business units in France.

Choosing Avaya Cloud Office for a Public Cloud Solution

Stemmer Distribution chose the Avaya UCaaS solution, Avaya Cloud Office® by RingCentral which perfectly met the group's specifications.

"We had considered migrating to a hosted solution in a datacenter, but the feedback from our provider Artelcom convinced us of the reliability and ergonomics of the Avaya Cloud Office public cloud solution," explains Alexandre Sicard, Infrastructure Manager.

"In just a few months, we went from an aging and costly infrastructure to an innovative and high-performance cloud solution.”

A Progressive Deployment

The Artelcom team accompanied Stemmer Distribution throughout the entire program, which was planned over a 9-month period. The deployment of the solution was carried out in four phases including 14 companies spread over six sites. It started with small sites and ended with the main site located in Tremblay, France. "Artelcom's project teams provided excellent advice throughout our project, and we benefited from customized support and perfect expertise of the solution. Their competence and proximity were real assets to ensure a smooth migration," adds Alexandre Sicard.

Excellent Adoption Rate Equals Excellent Experiences

Employees adopted the Avaya Cloud Office solution very quickly. The solution is intuitive, easy to use and perfectly meets their mobility needs. It is also easy to administer, which saves time on a daily basis for the Group's support team. The majority of employees are equipped with softphones, the remaining 10% have telephones adapted to specific functions. The teams in the warehouses also use the solution on their mobile phones via a WiFi infrastructure, a solution that is much more economical than the old DECT mobile infrastructure.

A 50% Saving on Annual Recurring Costs

“In line with our expectations, our annual telecom budget has been cut in half thanks to the Avaya Cloud Office solution. With several months of hindsight, we are fully satisfied with the solution, which has allowed us to achieve our goals of improving the employee experience while optimizing our costs,” says Alexandre Sicard.

Following the success of the solution in France, Stemmer Distribution could consider to deploy the Avaya Cloud Office solution in other European organizations to modernize them as well.