Zinpro embraces IP communications

Zinpro Corporation, a Minnesota based company, is the worldwide leader in the animal trace mineral market. Zinpro researches and produces the most effective trace minerals available to the livestock industry today.

With a widely distributed research, production and sales network, the company needs effective communications. "Managing growth and change in communications is core to providing a good service to our users," said Director or Information Systems, Thys Coetzee. "Experience shows that good partner support helps in ramping up and then maintaining technologies. I wanted global IP based system that could flex and adapt as we grew." They wanted to get to a situation where all communication – data, voice, video etc. - would be easy to use and seamless throughout the entire organization.

The plan required a global networking infrastructure that had redundancies and rapid fail-over capabilities. "Sounds just like the Internet, doesn’t it?" quips Coetzee. "We have been using VPN technologies over the public internet since the late 90’s. It was a very cost-effective way to get a wide reach." "Frankly though, everybody was trying to sell us their version of the way things should be done. Nobody seemed able to show us how they could solve some of our specific needs", said Bernie Wojcik, Zinpro’s senior network administrator. "Phenomenal Networks was one of the companies that approached us and assured us they could help. As many of our vendors will tell you, their assurances and intentions don’t cut much ice with Thys – get results or get out of the way. Phenomenal came in for a capability test and they are still with us", said Wojcik.

"Back in 2000, when I was completing the build-out of our new corporate headquarters in Eden Prairie, the VoIP phone systems were still long on promise and short on delivery. I could not take a traditionally minded company down that unknown path at that time. We chose a standard PBX that had some VoIP extensions and we ran some test voice links through our VPN tunnels. Later, with Phenomenal’s help, we built out and improved our LANs and WAN, replacing cascading switches with larger, more capable Cisco core switches, adding routers and upgraded our security layers. Every piece was added with the long term goals of stability, reliability and expandability," said Coetzee.," said Coetzee.

VoIP technology has improved much over the years while Zinpro was developing the rest of its IP systems. Budgets were created to replace ageing PBX equipment at some locations with Cisco VoIP and the migration plan for the headquarters system was laid out. A failure in the standard PBX at the headquarters location upset the smooth plans. The solution with the vendor at that time was a long and expensive migration to a newer system, leaving Zinpro with a dead phone system on a Friday afternoon. Coetzee lined up Phenomenal Networks, the PRI providers and his staff to be ready for an emergency build-out of a new Cisco VoIP Call Manager system to replace the failed PBX. Zinpro personnel were warned that there would be telephone problems for a few days during the following week. Phenomenal rattled the supply chains and put together the detailed design for the Call Manager. By Monday morning people and equipment were ready and by the end of Wednesday the headquarters was connected to the world again and the office staff had received training on their new phones from Phenomenal’s trainers.

"My staff and the Phenomenal folks did a great job getting us up and running so quickly," said Coetzee. "I have to add that Zinpro’s executive team reacted promptly to the crisis and let us get on with the work. The personnel showed great patience during the build and also over the following few months while they got to grips with this new approach to telephony. The Phenomenal people worked through the weekend and nights, shoulder to shoulder with my staff, to get us up and running".

From that point, the system has been continually expanded as part of the phased plan to reach the goal of converged communications throughout the company. Wiring and infrastructure work is being done at some locations ahead of implementing VoIP. "You must take care of the basics," say Coetzee. "Good people like Phenomenal and good equipment cannot compensate for sub-standard network construction and poor PRI service to your building."

"From the start we designed the architecture to provide us with full disaster recovery", explained Coetzee. "We built a business continuity center attached to our new biochemical research facility. The call managers at each location share the work of keeping the system functioning."

The lab building includes a state-of-the-art conference facility used for customer meetings and training. It is also designed to act as the disaster control base should the headquarter building become inoperative. "We can move the operations in there in the event of trouble and also have people operate from home. The IP Communicator software on our laptops will register on the Call Managers and we should be able to continue operations at a reasonable level while we deal with whatever caused the problem", said Coetzee.

"I like the fact that we can centrally monitor and control all the remote locations" commented Wojcik. "Also we have the phones backed up through a separate PSTN connection. One of our remote offices reported they had a data link problem recently but the phones were still working fine thanks to the back-up."

Future plans include addition of the international offices on to the network. "Our infrastructure is not quite ready yet in many of the countries", commented Coetzee. "However we still use the whole IP/Internet approach so we use systems such as Skype and Messenger to save costs on communications."

The bottom line is that Zinpro is pleased with the progress and their choice of Cisco and Phenomenal as partners. "Many companies approached us but none showed us the ability to actually do the job and do it like Phenomenal has. Phenomenal is part of our team, even to the overnight and weekend sessions", said Coetzee. "Cisco has also worked as part of the solution team and even to their local support person hand-coding a solution to problems. Cisco has good equipment and they stand behind it", said Coetzee.