Focused on innovation and product development, Florida Crystals Corporation is a joint owner of ASR Group International, the world’s largest refiner and marketer of cane sugar with operations in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Belize, the United Kingdom, Portugal, and Italy. The company produces a full line of grocery, industrial, food service, and specialty sweetener products. Florida Crystals wanted to modernize collaboration and voice platforms, improve videoconferencing capabilities, and integrate analog devices to address the needs of its growing, international workforce. Working with its partners UnifiedCommunications.com, Logitech, NTT Data Group, HP | Poly, Yealink, and AudioCodes, the company adopted a value-added solution across Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Teams Phone, Operator Connect, and Teams Rooms. After consolidating its private branch exchange (PBX) installation and eliminating leased lines, Florida Crystals found that its telecom expenses dropped 78%.
The challenges of aging telephony technologies in a global workplace
Florida Crystals Corporation, with its subsidiary, ASR Group, grows sugarcane and refines and markets cane sugar, with product lines for industrial, specialty, and consumer markets across North America, Belize, and Europe. As a multinational corporation with a globally distributed team, Florida Crystals wanted to modernize its collaboration and voice platforms. With its on-premises telephony solution experiencing issues with connectivity, the company aimed to improve videoconferencing capabilities and integrate existing analog devices. It also sought to address the declining performance of its existing system and increasing costs of public switched telephone network (PSTN) service.
With its telephony solution approaching end of life, Florida Crystals recognized that maintaining it would require a costly lifecycle refresh of telephony hardware and peripherals. The company’s reliance on 40 on-premises PBX servers handling call routing, with 2,000 desk phones and 15 video-enabled conference rooms, led to growing user concerns over the complexity and increasing unreliability of the conference room technology. Florida Crystals’s technology team decided to migrate to the cloud, moving off existing on-premises private branch exchange (PBX) server and copper connectivity infrastructure.
Partnering to build a cloud telephony solution
Florida Crystals was already heavily invested in Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft 365, and Skype for Business as part of its collaboration strategy. It saw Microsoft Teams as a way to integrate and streamline how SharePoint was delivered and consumed within its organization. Florida Crystals worked with partners on a solution roadmap that included Microsoft Teams Phone and Microsoft Teams Rooms. It wanted to implement and deploy a standard software-as-a-service (SaaS) telephony solution, following deployment best practices to modernize its collaboration and voice platforms, improve videoconferencing capabilities, and integrate analog devices. Stuart Stephenson, Senior Infrastructure Architect at Florida Crystals Corporation, says, “One of our key principles, from an architecture and IT enterprise standpoint, is that we try and use SaaS—and maintain a standard Microsoft solution.” He adds, “We use best practices to deploy, and steer away from, the complexities of customization.” The company adopted a Teams Phone and Teams Rooms solution initially, beginning deployments of Teams Phone in 2018, when it chose Teams as a collaboration platform and voice solution and migrated from Skype for Business and Avaya desk phones.
With its existing on-premises environment with aging telephony technologies, Florida Crystals required technology partners who understood the technical dependencies of existing, longstanding installations. It turned to technology partners Logitech, NTT Data Group, HP | Poly, Yealink, AudioCodes, and UnifiedCommunications.com.
In 2019, Logitech provided the hardware for the company’s conference room solution, including Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms. UnifiedCommunications.com installed Teams Rooms, and HP | Poly provided the headsets and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) handsets for the solution. In partnership with AudioCodes, NTT Data Group developed the core platform to consolidate its PBX network installation. Calls between employees happen in Teams Phone and skip the PSTN, removing long-distance costs on internal calls. Direct Routing as a Service (DRaaS), and later Operator Connect, delivered PSTN service to employees—to further reduce complexity and streamline employee onboarding and offboarding—all within Teams Phone.
Revolutionizing connectivity
Aggregate telecom expenses for Florida Crystals dropped by 78% after the company consolidated the PBX exposure, eliminated leased lines, and deployed the Teams Phone–based solution. The Direct routing option provided PSTN connectivity that reached all the geographies where customers needed coverage, and reduced the company’s telecom budget. The company now counts 2,322 phone users on Operator Connect. All on-premises PBX lines have been decommissioned and transitioned to Teams, and the company has 400 devices with Teams Phone, in addition to SIP common-area phones. Florida Crystals has experienced vast improvements in collaboration and communication efforts across globally distributed departments. With increased flexibility for users and administrators, the company was reassured that Teams Phone was an intuitive solution. “We tried other videoconferencing solutions that did not work,” says Dan Hall, Global IT Collaboration Solution Owner, Florida Crystals Corporation. “From an organizational standpoint, Teams made videoconferencing ubiquitous across our organization.” He adds, “Teams involved people, so they were able to get involved from a meeting room standpoint. The whole hybrid working scenario for us became a lot easier because we could see people’s faces. We could see expressions.”
Compared with its previous expensive and complex systems, the low cost to entry and ease of use of Teams Meeting Rooms drove increased adoption at Florida Crystals. The company now has more than 80 Teams conference rooms. Room health reporting and metrics has significantly improved conference room reliability. Hall explains, “We simplified our meeting rooms so they had the same look and feel—making collaboration at a physical level a lot easier, removing barriers that we had pre-COVID-19. We now have meeting rooms that work properly, that everyone knows how to use.” The company’s Teams implementation was close to complete prior to lockdown during the pandemic. Florida Crystals found itself in good shape, using the flexibility of Teams to quickly evolve ways of working. Keeping critical business functions operational was a vital benefit too. Hall says, “Teams Phone revolutionized the way we communicate. Prior to COVID-19, we had 2,000 desk phones. We’ve replaced them with 400 phones and headsets.” He adds, “Teams Phone changed the way people talk to each other, enabling voice users the flexibility to work in a hybrid environment.” As a technology early adopter, the company is exploring using Teams Phone Mobile as a unified collaboration and communication experience for employees in field service roles.
Automating industrial process controls
With the deployment of Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 within the E\Copilot for Microsoft Early Access Program in late 2023, Florida Crystals has launched a significant initiative to incorporate Copilot within daily workflows. It's also beginning to explore Microsoft Copilot Studio and generative AI capabilities for custom scenarios. The advanced security of Copilot was a major factor in the company’s adoption. Florida Crystals appreciated generative AI benefits without the security risk and potential sensitive data leaks that come with open AI. It aims to take advantage of predictive analytics to automate and continuously improve industrial control systems. Since starting the Copilot trial of 300 licenses, Florida Crystals has gradually folded generative AI capabilities into daily workflows. Currently, it has reached 74% adoption and is reviewing options to expand beyond 300 users. The company’s goal for Copilot usage is to improve the quality output of daily work, reduce time spent on routine tasks, improve overall productivity, and reduce costs. It’s now leveraging Copilot in marketing workflows, to reduce costs of third-party expenses for content production. “We get a lot of feedback on the use of Copilot to search through Microsoft products for different files and the capability in Teams of note taking, pulling action items, and summarizing chats. Copilot is both scribe and file keeper,” says Cat Calsetta, IT Performance Management and Communication Senior Analyst at Florida Crystals Corporation.
To create process efficiencies in the workplace, the company is using Copilot to create more productive work that’s efficient and cost-effective. It plans to incorporate generative AI into industrial process control systems across global regions. “With technology in meeting rooms, AI has already had an impact—with camera tracking, voice recognition, and Teams interoperation with Copilot in meetings, and note-taking capabilities,” Stephenson says. “With Teams, we can now temporarily review transcripts and produce meeting notes, and find meeting-generated content with capabilities of indexing and searching.”
Florida Crystals plans to use Microsoft AI capabilities to analyze customer order history and accurately forecast customer demand. The company’s goal is to drive more visibility across supply chain planning, such as tracking materials in inventory, improve operations planning, and expand maintenance scheduling to increase operational availability and overall production capacity. “We want to move away from traditional file sharing to structured storage with better metadata so people can find information,” Stephenson says. “We’re importing information into the purview of Copilot, working with 50-year-old physical drawings and reports. It provides valuable tools to cross-reference data. We’re reacting to new-world problems with old-world solutions.”
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“Teams Phone revolutionized the way we communicate. Prior to COVID-19, we had 2,000 desk phones. We’ve replaced them with 400 phones and headsets. Teams Phone changed the way people talk to each other, enabling voice users the flexibility to work in a hybrid environment.”
Dan Hall, Global IT Collaboration Solution Owner, Florida Crystals Corporation
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