Avaya Streamlines Internal Processes, Opens New Markets for Marine Rescue Technologies

Company Can Now Deliver Solutions in a Fraction of the Time, Greatly Expand into Vertical Markets

For over 15 years, Marine Rescue Technologies (MRT) has manufactured safety systems for vessels and facilities in the offshore oil and gas, defense, commercial marine and renewable energy industries worldwide. With high-quality man overboard alerts, alarms, locators and retrieval systems—and a commitment to integrity and customer service—the Florida-based company delivers security and peace of mind.

MRT works very closely with each of its customers to develop highly customized solutions. By implementing the Avaya OneCloud CPaaS platform, customers experience has improved significantly.

“Avaya OneCloud CPaaS has improved our ability to respond to customers quickly and with very specialized, specific solutions to meet their needs,” said Michael Ritchie, founder and owner, Marine Rescue Technologies. “MRT is unique because we offer accountability of personnel in the form of muster through our emergency notification system.”

Avaya OneCloud provides a communications platform whereby MRT can offer outbound and inbound notification campaigns and business automation for any vertical market in any language.

“The OneCloud API, Avaya Cloud Notification Service, was very easy to integrate by providing a response and location request to anyone with a mobile phone,” said Ritchie. “We use it for mass notification purposes such as catastrophic weather. It can also be used during any emergency and has been purchased by state governments and airports.”

“The API is very well documented and all of the functionality you need—even the small nuances involved with the telecom side—it’s all in there,” he adds. “We view Avaya and OneCloud as a valuable part of our business. They’ve delivered what we needed.”

In addition to OneCloud CPaaS, MRT uses Avaya’s cloud solution for its own in-house unified communications needs.

Streamlined Communication

“The big thing we wanted was service,” says Ritchie. “We wanted to be able to rely on technicians to help us with issues so that we could spend time on our marine business—not on trying to get our telephones sorted.”

With the new Avaya OneCloud platform, customers who call MRT are greeted by a virtual receptionist who can offer a list of options and transfer them to the right team member.

When employees receive calls through the OneCloud app, they can now differentiate between business and personal calls, and they can easily transfer calls from one cell phone to another.

“Our calls come through, the call clarity’s good, and the calls go to the right people. We can get more done because we don’t spend hours a month on the phone with our vendor,” Ritchie says. “And our customers aren’t getting bounced around or told that somebody will call them back—so they’re getting better service as well.”

Achieving Goals

Ritchie and his team are now focused on what they do best: providing life-saving products to their customers. MRT's original, premise-based AutoCrew management system now resides in the cloud. AutoCrew supports some of the world’s most secure sites operating both onshore and offshore. The industrial-strength offering was designed from the ground up based on customers’ unique requirements and included first-ever features to the automatic POB/Muster market.

“The objective was always to move AutoCrew to the cloud,” explains Darryl Jackman, MRT’s business automation developer. “That’s what we’ve done through the Avaya OneCloud CPaaS solution, and it went very smoothly.”

As a cloud-based service, AutoCrew offers targeted, multi-directional communication via SMS, voice and email, providing complete situational awareness, Geo-pinpointing and analytical presentation. Accurate and immediate data is crucial during an emergency. This includes how many people are on site, how many are missing, who they are and next of kin, and who is or is not okay, with pinpoint location, during severe weather or a shooter incident.

Jackman evaluated several CPaaS solutions for the development of the AutoCrew Cloud system and found the Avaya OneCloud API to be very well designed compared to competitor’s products.

“The OnceCloud API was very easy to integrate for two-way communications into our application. It was plug-and-play and very well documented,” he says. “All of the functionality you need, even the small nuances involved with the telecom side, it’s all in there. It’s a very powerful system.”

Another advantage, according to Jackman, is that the OnceCloud solution is completely PBX, database and hardware independent. That means upgrades don’t interfere with customer operations.

Benefits On and Off Shore

Both MRT and its customers are reaping the benefits of AutoCrew Cloud. For MRT, its ability to deliver a cloud system much more quickly than a premise-based solution is an important competitive differentiator.

“Our customers have been extremely happy with AutoCrew Cloud, they can get a fully functioning system in record time now,” says Ritchie. “For example, we received a call last fall from Baptist Hospital in Jacksonville. There was a hurricane rolling in and their hurricane hotline wasn’t operational. They asked us to set one up for them before the hurricane’s predicted landfall in 18 hours. We delivered a fully functional, redundant, secure, encrypted hotline within 18 hours that could handle more than the 5,000 calls a day that they anticipated.”

Muster feedback—response tracking to a mass notification—has become increasingly critical. MRT has found that the Avaya OneCloud solution expands its ability to provide that. Avaya OneCloud powers MRT’s automated alert system with SMS and voice, giving clients bi-directional texting capability.

“MRT is unique because we offer accountability of personnel in the form of muster through our automated alert system. This is a much more accurate way to track the status of employees in a drill or an actual emergency,” says Ritchie. “Our muster capability greatly increases employee safety and situational visibility, and with OneCloud, we can now offer that much more widely through our cloud solution.”

Expanding reach

Ritchie is excited about the potential for further leveraging the power of Avaya OneCloud. Plans for the immediate future include porting additional AutoCrew functionality, like Certificate Tracking and Permit to Work (PTW), to the cloud.

For Jackman’s part, he’s confident that Avaya OneCloud will grow with the company.

“AutoCrew Cloud allows us to expand our services from offshore and high-security environments right into the communities we all live in,” he says. “We’ll be very focused on increasing our reach into new vertical markets.”