Pittsburg-based Patterson Manufacturing, which is a 150-year-old business that was founded on the banks of the Monongahela River, has picked Internet and cloud-based voice services from Comcast Business.
Patterson is using the Comcast Business services to support its engineering, manufacturing, sales and customer service operations. The company started out doing blacksmith work and providing services to steam-powered paddleboats, but now it produces ratchets, winches, tensors and turnbuckles for the river barge industry.
In addition to speeding up the online transfer of bandwidth-intensive CAD/CAM files between the company’s engineers and customers, the new services will be used to support the productivity of Patterson Manufacturing’s increasingly mobile workforce and customer base, which are also overseas in Asia and South America.
Patterson Manufacturing is currently using Comcast Business VoiceEdge, which is a cloud-based voice and unified communications platform that helps employees stay connected with their phone features when they are away from their desks.
“We’re constantly striving to stay on the cutting edge by being safer, easier and faster than our competition, both in how we design our products and how we operate as a company. These principles were mirrored by the team at Comcast Business, and we knew their solutions would also give us many advanced features that weren’t previously possible with our old phone system,” said Taylor Grapes, international sourcing and logistics manager for Patterson Manufacturing. “While voice service should be easy to use, our previous system made completing simple tasks like changing our voicemail messages feel like we were trying to crack da Vinci’s code. By switching to Comcast, we can automatically forward calls to our cell phones, have them sent to email and retrieve them from any computer, and control everything from a mobile app – and that barely scratches the surface of our new system’s advanced capabilities.”
The company is also using a 50 Mbps data service from Comcast, which will allow engineers to send and receive large design files much faster than its previous service. The faster Internet service will also support the company’s internal training initiatives conducted via live webcams, including 3D modeling system training and enterprise resource planning (ERP) tutorials.
“The telephone hadn’t even been invented when Patterson Manufacturing first opened its doors, but its longevity and growth is a tribute to its ability to evolve and continually innovate to meet the needs of its customers worldwide,” said Paul Savas, Northeast Division Senior Director for Comcast Business. “Our network was built for businesses like Patterson so they can use our advanced voice and Internet services to be more productive, respond to customers faster and stay connected virtually anywhere in the world without feeling as though they’ve even left the office.”