Having a seasonal business is nothing out of the ordinary. In the food industry, seasonality is the whole essence of activity. Seeds are planted, they grow, and food is harvested in strict season. Yet what if the answer to growing business meant growing seasons had to be extended beyond norms or even new seasons invented? This is indeed the strategy deployed by Seneca Food Corporation, and in supporting its novel and advanced methods of food cultivation, the company has also taken an innovative approach to the advanced communications that underpin its organisation.
The Fairport, New York-based company began life in 1949, and describes itself as an integrated fruit and vegetable processing company. It manages many – and in some cases, all – aspects of production. It produces seeds, harvests and crops, and manufactures its own containers to provide a wide range of fruit and vegetable products. The company’s produce is sourced from over 1,400 American farms, typically family farmers it has done business with for many years, or even generations.
The company processes over 50 different types of fruits and vegetables, and has a variety of capabilities and packaging options in the frozen and shelf stable markets. Processing plants are strategically located close to growers so that fields are freshly harvested and processed at peak freshness, locking in nutrients and minimising environmental impact.
Seneca manages over eight million square feet of warehousing, and has its own network of tractor trailers. Strategically located distribution centres are designed to maximise service and reduce freight costs. The company’s inventory management systems have been tailored to the business to maximise year-round supply availability and cost savings due to scale and geographic diversity, and it has 100,000 square foot warehouses with 24/7 vertical integration of operations from sowing, harvesting, canning and shipping.
The company believes its success depends on solid relationships between growers, employees, customers and local communities. It currently has 31 manufacturing locations contracts with approximately 1,600 growers for over 200,000 acres of produce. With locations coast-to-coast across the US, Seneca claims to have more geographical crop diversity for vegetables than most other processors. Its plants are said to be strategically located very close to its growers so that fields are freshly harvested and processed at peak freshness, locking in nutrients as well as minimising environmental impact.
Enterprise network manager Tim Eddinger said he has been to every one of the company’s locations across the US, describing the scientists as “superheroes” who are involved in cutting-edge techniques such as trying to establish a bean that will grow in six weeks and have new development characteristics to boost yields. “We can only process so much intake,” he said. “What if we could have a second growing season? We could double the process or get a few seasons out of it. That could be a game-changer.”
In this diverse firm is Avaya communications and contact centre technology managed by a department that Eddinger said is an anomaly for a very large business. “We’re dealing with other large companies and entities,” he said. “We don’t really have call centres [but we see what] we can do with auto attendants and interactive voice response systems [IVRs], the features in the phones [to give] the ability for our sales staff to work anywhere in the world.”
Outcome-based approach
Eddinger has been at Seneca for six years, and from the outset, he’s attempted to have an outcome-based approach to improve processes. Coming from a consulting background, before he joined, he talked with Seneca about process improvement. “When I came on board, I asked how much an hour’s downtime was,” he said. “‘How about our biggest plant and processing centre? How much is an hour?’”
In the first two years, he learned about the business and developed a strategic plan in making the business more efficient, or reducing the areas where employees get fatigue and stress such as repetitive motion through automation.
“I’m like, ‘What are our biggest issues? What are our biggest problems?’ Old technology. Because with razor-thin margins, we’re going to be using the technology until it tells us it’s done, which, in this day and age, is especially a security issue,” he said. “You have to worry about a patch – is someone going to hack in? We had to have a strategy on upgrading our wireless throughout the plants because, again, that feeds our business. Everyone’s using scan guns. We had to look at the scan gun technology.”
This challenge is made harder through the sheer scale of the business. Avaya has been the company’s comms provider of choice for the past nine years, three years before Eddinger took up his role there. A colleague, boasting as much as 22 years with the firm, was key to making sure communications infrastructure upgrade projects took place. Indeed, Eddinger said he hadn’t so much as touched Avaya before he came on board.
“The company was spending $5,000-$6,000 a month on networking … and about the time I got involved, I converted that to go away,” he said. “Now, we’ve completely wiped out that monthly cost. It was about savings, but we are now also more knowledgeable on the system. Our Avaya team has been great for supporting us. Then the plan was then to move to session initiation protocol (SIP) to reduce costs, because who doesn’t want to reduce costs? Who doesn’t want to improve efficiencies? We had 15% AT&T MPLS [based networking] and at the other locations VPN [for comms]. For the same cost of what we paid for half our locations beyond MPLS with AT&T, we ended up with a reduced cost at all our locations, and not just MPLS.”
For most firms these days, transitioning out of MPLS is a key strategy. Seneca first got on the MPLS off ramp two years ago, and still has a small number of locations in which to make the switch. Network operations are now based from an established, secure, datacentre in Rochester, New York, with a backup facility in the same states. Eddinger said that over the course of the next three years, the company will be looking for what it regards as a better geographic location for its backup system. In its business, geography is crucial.
“We’re taking about farmers,” he said. “In the rural middle of nowhere where fibre wasn’t always available. We’re still using some copper MPLS. But technology has advanced, and we’re getting a lot more fibre over here, especially at the rural [locations]. But the goal was to go to SIP eventually. We then looked at [the required infrastructure and realised that] we needed SD-WAN on top. That’s because there are parts of the business that were failing to work and we had four hours of downtime on copper like internet circuit. I built that MPLS with a diverse internet carrier, whether it’s DSL or whether it’s fibre. I can put SIP anywhere, but I still didn’t trust voice over the internet.”
That was in 2021, when Eddinger first considered the idea of cloud office and all the features it brings. Despite the hype and massive pull of gravity to all things cloud, he said cloud works for Seneca just where it makes sense, and not because of some sense of having religion about cloud communications.
“We have home a homegrown manufacturing application that our business is built on, at our core, and that will never leave our datacentre,” he said. “We control that. And that’s the reason for having an MPLS and all the things we do for the SD-WAN. I am a proponent where cloud makes sense, and in the voice area, for me, it does, because we built this redundancy. The only thing that affects our business during our pack season is that we’re taking vegetables in, and we swelled to about 11,000-12,000 employees. Normally, we’re about 5,000. The demand on the business increases, but last year, we had the most uptime because we had SD-WAN in place, so I’m like, ‘Okay, well how do we do redundancy with the phone if, say, the power is out?’ We have penalties for missed shipments.”
Akin, and allied, to the geographic considerations Seneca’s network team has to take into consideration is climate. The bulk of the firm’s operations are concentrated in the hurricane alley that is the Midwest of the US. Having a reliable redundant phone network was crucial.
To address this need, Avaya supplied its RingCentral and Cloud Office services to build a SIP trunk between locations and then to support the decision to move corporate offices in February 2024. For Eddinger, this provided the opportunity to created a proof of concept at one of the locations.
“We loved the features of [Cloud Office] and the self-management of things,” he said. “I can manage this from a mobile device. And now, we are set to migrate the entire 1,200 routes and almost 1,300 users in the 31 locations.”
The company’s potential savings to the business run into the tens of thousands of dollars, as much as $13,000 per month just on the technology side. Not small potatoes, in any regard.
But with the Avaya communications platform, Seneca envisages more than numbers and rationalised costs. Indeed, the company is looking at innovation, but without disruption to the core activities of the business at large. And given upgrading comms has been a two-year project, a time over which so many enabling and essential technologies have been introduced and indeed flourished, it’s interesting to consider what has caught the eye of Seneca and how it is seen as being part of driving the business forward.
No disruption
The evolution of the deployment will put Seneca fully on Cloud Office and no disruption to operations is envisaged. For example, converting to the new handsets used with the Avaya comms offering is calculated to be a two-minute process. The application and its interface, and its ease of use, is said to be head and shoulders above what was used in the past.
Eddinger added that in completing his mission, he has had no real pushback from senior management. Nor has the job of making the business case for what he has deployed become more complex, even if he has had to examine closely the business model used for running the Avaya services.
“I know how the leadership thinks and works, and what was key for me was to do demos and have people touch and feel the [new comms system],” he said. “We own perpetual licences, so [the thinking was], ‘Why would we go to a subscription?’ Two years ago, we had a five-year adoption [plan] to go to the cloud. That’s been expedited a little bit. Two years in, and we have moved some applications to the cloud. And [we are] seeing the benefits of that [in terms of] efficiency.
“We are now using a trucker app for shipping, and that [process] was a little bit clunky, so we moved, and then Chronos for payroll, which we were using on-premise, and we went to a cloud model. It’s more robust and always-available options. If a plant’s power was down, people can pull up a cell phone and [carry on]. In our business, our overtime costs and shipping penalties create expensive hours of downtime.”
There are a number of areas in which Eddinger now believes the company is able to gain benefits that hitherto were not possible. What were once discreet on-premise offerings are now bolt-on, add-on applications to the cloud comms infrastructure.
“We are looking at like what we do with SAP, and what we do with human resources, integrating our health apps for people. In our largest corporate office in Wisconsin, which is driving the HR department, they love the new Cloud Office, voicemail, email, textual email and [voice messages] with a WAV file. That’s huge for them. For example, we have people throughout the business who can speak Spanish. So, to be able to send a WAV file to somebody that says, ‘This is what they’re asking, this is we’re doing,’ through the applications that bolt onto the cloud office [and then translate], helps us integrate our business.”
Usage and access
The business also has more efficient, encompassing gains in terms of telephony, contact centre, agents and business processes in general. In all, the new cloud comms infrastructure has made application usage and access easier, with the net result of the business being more mobile and agile. Looking to new areas where technology can be deployed to make even further gains, Seneca is now actively looking at artificial intelligence (AI).
Among the potential scenarios and uses, once again, supporting multi-language…