Case Study – Steel-Craft Door Products Ltd.

About the Client

Born out of the ornamental iron making skills of founder Art Michalcheon, Steel-Craft Door Products Ltd. has spent the past 50 years building a brand that is synonymous with the manufacturing of high quality, Canada-made residential, commercial and industrial doors.

With an expansive, 500,000 square foot, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Edmonton and distribution centres and dealer partners across the country, Steel-Craft has grown into a 230-employee leader in providing highly engineered door products to the North American home-building and commercial construction industries.

The Challenge

For a growing organization like Steel-Craft, sometimes bigger doesn’t necessarily translate to better. At least that’s the experience the company learned when it came to selecting their ISP.

“For a company our size, working directly with a big provider often means we’re just another name on a spreadsheet. You have to deal with having a new sales representative seemingly every six months, and lose out on having a true relationship with a provider that understands your strategic priorities,” says Robert McArthur, National IT Manager at Steel-Craft.

“When we have an issue that needs to be addressed quickly we need to know we can call someone who understands our business, and that doesn’t happen when your first point of contact is a call centre,” adds McArthur.

Recognizing the value of having a provider that acted like a partner, Steel-Craft has turned to Sunco for years for select mandates that supported the business.

“We had a Mitel system that we like, but found we were often struggling to get timely attention from sales and support,” says McArthur. “We never had anyone give us a really thorough overview of the features available to us, or let us know about new features that could help our business. They pretty much left us to figure things out ourselves.”

The Solution

Steel-Craft’s relationship with Sunco dates back years, with the manufacturer turning to Sunco for support with business internet, voice services and video conferencing.

They also previously leaned on Sunco to support the migration of Steel-Craft’s network to a mixed-provider Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) wide area network at a time when the company was expanding rapidly and required a significant upgrade in network reliability and performance across its numerous locations. So, when increased network demands called on an upgrade from MPLS to a new SD-WAN network, Steel-Craft knew who to call.

To address its managed VOIP issues, Steel-Craft migrated its Mitel Cloud system to a subscription-based offering from Sunco. Sunco took the time to conduct a thorough audit of the previous solution and through custom configuration were able to greatly improve Steel-Craft’s experience compared to the previous off-the-shelf setup. The value of having a provider that was truly invested in being a partner was evident immediately.

The Outcome

While Steel-Craft’s move to SD-WAN continues to be rolled out to each of its 10 locations across Canada, the results of the move are already having a positive impact on McArthur’s bottom line.

“We were able to really tap into Sunco’s wholesale partnerships with all major carriers and significantly upgrade our internet to meet our increased needs,” says McArthur. “They were able to bring to us a system that is delivering faster speeds for less money than our MPLS network. The cost savings have been significant already.”

At the same time, Steel-Craft’s transition of their Mitel Cloud system to Sunco has been proof-positive that sometimes the best value a company can receive doesn’t come from upgrading their technology, but rather from working a partner that helps them get more from the technology they already have.

“Even going Mitel Cloud to Mitel Cloud, we already feel like we have a significantly different and better product than before. We’re using features and functionality that we never even knew we had, and we’re getting much better service at no additional cost,” says McArthur. “The pricing is still in line with what it was previously, but the value we’re drawing from the system today is vastly greater than what was being offered by our large telco provider. We have Sunco’s personal touch, knowledge, experience and understanding of our business to thank for that.”

About Sunco

Sunco is your trusted independent business telecom and managed IT systems integrator, with more than 20 years of experience helping companies of all size get more from their telecommunications and IT services.

From helping clients find areas of cost savings and performance improvement, to implementing fully managed, customized security, networking and cloud solutions that can scale as their business’ grow, Sunco delivers high-quality, integrated business communications solutions with the employee-level commitment and collaborative approach every client relationship deserves.