Taiwan Kagome’s headquarters is located in Tainan City, with business bases in Taipei and Taichung. The main products are tomato raw materials, tomato ketchup, tomato juice, vegetable juice drinks, and more. Being the industry leader in tomato ketchup and tomato juice, Taiwan Kagome’s products are sold at major restaurants and stores throughout Taiwan.

Taiwan Kagome produces products with “Nature and Health” as a business philosophy. For raw materials, Taiwan Kagome treat farmland as the first step of the production process, controlling the quality of raw materials from the beginning with the cooperation from the contracted farmers.

In the factory, there is strict internal control regulations for each product and the quality inspection room conducts strict inspections for each batch of products. Through this process, Taiwan Kagome believes that only the products that meet the requirements of “Nature and Health” philosophy can be delivered to the customers.

Challenges

Delivering safe and reliable food to the customers at all times requires keeping products fresh, maintaining proper inventory, and fulfilling customer orders and fast delivery requirements. To achieve this, with 160 employees in Taiwan, close communication among them was vital.

However, the communications systems in Tainan headquarters, Taipei, and Taichung were from different vendors. As a result, the communications systems were not able to be integrated with each other, causing inconveniences in dialing and call forwarding operations, etc. In addition, the existing systems have been operated for a while not being able to maintain good voice communication quality.

In the event of a communication failure, coordination with the respective vendors was required, placing a heavy burden on IT staff and taking a long time to recover.

In addition, Tainan headquarters has a production factory, product storage, and raw material storage on the 16,000 sq. meter site. Factory employees often move among various facilities while the factory is in operation. For this reason, to respond to emergency calls in a timely manner, employees used mobile phones even for internal calls that lead to an increase in communication costs. Sales representatives also used mainly mobile phone because they often traveled to Taipei and Taichung offices or to the customers. When the customer called the company representative number, operator could not transfer that call to sales representative and had to leave a message. The sales persons had to call back to the customer after checking the message. When renewing the aging communications system, it was necessary to improve this inefficient operation and reduce communication costs.

Solution

• Install UNIVERGE SV9100 at Tainan Headquarters
• Install only IP phones at Taichung office and register to UNIVERGE SV9100 at Tainan Headquarters. No system required for the Taichung Office
• Install NEC SL2100 at Taipei office and establish VoIP network with UNIVERGE SV9100 at Tainan headquarters to enable extension calls among sites
• Integrate VAM (Video Audio Mobility) solution that allows smartphones app (ST500) to be used as extension terminals

Results

With the installation of UNIVERGE SV9100 and VAM solutions, Taiwan Kagome has renewed its company numbering plan. After the system implementation, not only calls within the site but also internal calls between the sites became available with more intuitive operations, reducing calls to mobile phones over the public network. This led to contributing to reduce communication costs for the entire company.

Now, when the sales staff receives a call to their desk phone in the office, at the same time, the incoming call also goes to ST500 which is installed on the sales staff’s smartphone. This ensures the sales staff not missing important calls from the customers or colleagues in the company.

UNIVERGE SV9100 & VAM Solution has also improved the reliability of the operation of the system and no major communication failure has occurred since installation.

Mr. Sam Nagata, CEO of Taiwan Kagome mentioned that “VAM solution has improved communication for employees to be more efficient and it has contributed to deliver “Nature and Health” food to the customers in Taiwan market. Currently, our employees use VAM solution for voice communication, but learning that ST500 can easily start video calls, we would like to start using the video calls on a daily basis for more business operation improvement. Our experience with NEC solutions and their partner has been excellent. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to say how happy we are.”

Customer profile

 

Type of business	Food industry
Established	1967
URL	https://www.kagome.com.tw/