Customer Spotlight: Mid-America Car, Inc.
By Laren Landgren, Agent Manager, and Audrey Tomlinson, Agent Account Manager at Avid Communications
Along the Missouri River in the Northeast Industrial District of Kansas City is where you’ll find Mid-America Car, Inc. When we say car, we don’t mean your day to day automobile, we mean a locomotive car.
Mid-America Car, Inc. was founded in 1978 by Curtis and Janice Blanc as an on-site unit coal train maintenance contractor for Kansas City Power and Light. For more than 40 years, Mid-America Car has been working in the locomotive and freight car inspection, repair, and modification industry. Although many believe that the railroad industry is still functioning in the past; Mid-America Car shows people the advanced skills and equipment needed to maintain their state of the art facility and provide exceptional customer service through the process. By staying compliant with state and industry regulations, they are working to stay up to date with the latest locomotive and freight car repair and modification methods and technologies.
Mid-America Car was introduced to Avid by their IT Vendor, Cytek Corporation.
Just like their freight cars, Mid-America Car knew their phone system needed to be up to date as well. Their premise-based Lucent system (Lucent was later bought by Avaya) was on the fritz, since it was 20+ years old. They were also interested in VoIP technology.
To move to a hosted VoIP business phone system, you first need reliable internet.
Mid-America Car was using a fixed wireless internet connection with a 4G wireless back up. It worked, but wasn’t reliable. From their location in the middle of the train tracks, getting reliable internet has never been easy. However, Avid was able to bring in 50MB of dedicated fiber bandwidth. This also provided reliability the site had never seen before. We configured wireless backup in case the fiber internet did go down.
With a solid internet connection, the phones were next.
We set up every user with their own desk phone, as well as the MaxUC smartphone application. That way, when people are out working in the yard, they can still be contacted.
Not only were we able to keep their people connected wherever they are located, we were also able to connect a second building on site. All employees, regardless of building location, can be reached with the press of a button. And transferring calls is seamless. Previously, the other building had their own number, separate phones and even used an answering machine so someone could leave a message. This upgrade has definitely made a difference in their day to day communication!
With their business phones and network being as up to speed as their locomotive technologies, Mid-America Car is ensuring their future looks as bright as their past.
Do you need help with your business phone system or internet bandwidth? Let’s talk!
