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Webinar Recording: Intersection of AV and ADA Compliance

ADA compliance

Access this webcast for a look at the issues you’ll encounter with accessibility and ways you can ensure your AV technology complies with the Americans With Disabilities Act.

When technology solutions don’t follow compliance dictates, they have the potential to create more barriers. For example: a lectern where the AV controls are not accessible to people in wheelchairs or a display that sticks out too far from the wall and becomes a hazard for those with sight disabilities.

In this AVI-SPL webinar, Legrand | AV’s Kathryn Gaskell and Karen Smidt discuss a few sections of the ADA (American With Disabilities Act) most relevant to AV, including:

  • Reach Ranges (section 308)
  • Operable Parts (sections 205 and 209)
  • Protruding Objects (sections 204 and 307)

You’ll gain an understanding of the AV challenges inherent in each section, and learn solutions for creating a more inclusive environment.

Get the recording for “The Intersection of AV Technology and the ADA: Challenges and Solutions” >

About the presenters

Kathryn Gaskell
Director of Product Management – Chief Brand
Legrand | AV
 
Kathryn has worked at Legrand | AV for six years, leading product management for the Chief brand. Her efforts have led to the development of industry-leading display mounting solutions for education and corporate environments, digital signage applications and more. Her interest in ADA was spiked by frequent questions from customers, and a desire to solve their accessibility challenges with practical, well-designed solutions.
 
Karen Smidt
Director of Marketing – Commercial Brands
Legrand | AV
 
Karen began working at Legrand | AV 13 years ago and is currently leading the commercial marketing team in their efforts to provide useful, educational content to our customers and end users. Working with Kathryn to better understand customer questions around ADA, she has developed educational resources to help explain and solve many of the challenges at the intersection of AV and accessibility. 

To view our Partner blog, click here

Webinar Recording: Technology That Bridges the Workplace Generation Gap

AV in Meeting Spaces

During this AVI-SPL webinar on the challenges and opportunities businesses face in their multigenerational workplaces, you’ll learn about the differences in work styles among the generations, what people expect from their workplace experience, and the technology that meets those needs.

Saundra Merollo, senior engineer for Sharp, and Nick Belcore, executive VP of global sales and marketing for Peerless, explore the importance of enabling collaboration among remote employees and empowering IT departments to manage a wide variety of networked devices. They also explain the types of solutions that help recruit and retain new talent, and cover topics including:

  • Changing workplace demographics
  • Collaboration trends (including voice-activated control)
  • Digital display trends
  • Sharp’s Windows Collaboration Display
  • Peerless outdoor digital kiosks

Get the recording for “Technology That Bridges the Workplace Generation Gap >

To view our Partner blog, click here

How to Calculate the Value of Your Digital Workplace Solutions

AV Everywhere

Just about any significant expenditure you make in business needs to be justified with an estimated return on investment (ROI). Because AVI-SPL provides the digital services that are designed to improve how your business operates, we’ve created a calculator that you can use to figure out the financial value of digital workplace solutions.

Our new productivity calculator will factor in your company’s information and show the benefits of solutions that improve the employee experience and productivity in the workplace.

Forrester Consulting’s “Total Economic Impact of AVI-SPL’s Digital Workplace Solutions” shows the kind of value you can get from improving your collaboration solutions and outsourcing their support to AVI-SPL. Based on a three-year model, the study showed a meeting productivity increase worth $11.9 million. Other findings from the report, which aggregated four different AVI-SPL customers into a composite company, found:

  • 14.3% net reduction in total cost of ownership of digital meeting solutions 
  • 20% increase in meeting-room utilization
  • $1.5M in savings on management and support costs

To estimate your savings, go to this landing page to access the calculator. Once you’ve downloaded the spreadsheet, you can enter information like:

  • The number of meeting rooms in your company
  • How many rooms will be equipped with video conferencing systems
  • Hourly cost of your full-time employees
  • Cost per square foot of meeting spaces

Take a few minutes to gather the info needed and a few seconds to enter it into the spreadsheet. Our calculator will then determine the value delivered by higher meeting-room utilization, improved staff productivity, and AVI-SPL’s managed services. And you’ll have the ROI numbers that clear the path for digital workplace transformation that improves the culture, productivity and efficiency of your business.

Download the AVI-SPL Digital Workplace Solutions ROI Calculator >

To view our Partner blog, click here

Show Us Your Collaborative Work Space on National Selfie Day

AV Everywhere

Friday, June 21, is National Selfie Day. Which probably means it’s a day like any other for people who love (or live) to share on social media. But whether you’re a novice at the self portrait or a seasoned expert, we have a special request.

AVI-SPL is taking part in this unofficial holiday by asking its clients, offices, and LinkedIn and Twitter followers to share their favorite collaborative work spaces and tag them #NationalSelfieDay. To give you some guidance on what we’re looking for, AVI-SPL’s Marketing team has shared its enthusiastic contribution.

As we receive photos, I’ll upload them into a gallery in this post, so check back over the next few days for more images — and possibly some inspiration for your organization. 

AVI-SPL specializes in being a digital services provider to organizations around the world — which means we provide them with the collaboration technology that helps team members share knowledge, brainstorm, and drive better business outcomes. We work with our customers to define what collaboration looks like to their organization. And over the next few days, we hope to see examples of where that collaboration takes place for you.

Share your images to our Twitter or LinkedIn accounts. 

AVI-SPL Canada selfie
AVI-SPL Marketing Team

To view our Partner blog, click here

How AI and AVI-SPL Are Improving the Workplace

AI

As I read the new AVI-SPL tech brief, “How AI Will Make Collaboration Experts of Us All,” l saw parallels between the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace and what AVI-SPL delivers to its clients through services that range from consultation to design to integration and support. 

That paper combines research with the insights of AVI-SPL’s Customer Advisory Board (or CAB). This CAB of large enterprises (including Fortune 500 companies), looks at the ways AI is being applied in the workplace to improve the processes associated with meetings and collaboration. The tech brief gives a good overview of issues like:

  • In-meeting productivity
  • Security risks
  • Virtual digital assistance
  • Project management
  • Resource allocation

Using AI to Improve Operations

The issue of meeting support has its own list of opportunities for AI systems to improve efficiency and accuracy while maintaining quality. Opportunities include: 

  • Schedule meetings
  • Room set-up
  • Take notes; suggest resources that help with meeting objectives
  • Report on the project progress
  • Track projects and assign deadlines and tasks to help with their completion
  • In-meeting technical support (instead of calling a help desk). The system can rout the issue to a technician if necessary.

Beyond collaboration, AI systems take information and learn from it to make decisions that align with a desired outcome or set of outcomes across departments and uses cases:  For example: 

  • Human resources
    • Recruiting, onboarding and training
    • Answer employee questions
  • Customer service
    • Analyzing customer sentiment and making recommendations 
  • Marketing and sales
    • Improving customer resource management, like finding specific types of customers
  • Education
    • Help teachers adjust their approach to the learning styles of individual students
  • Healthcare
    • Recommend treatment options

AI may also recommend cross-departmental collaboration opportunities, fix equipment failures, predict when downtime is likely to occur and take steps to mitigate its impact.

AVI-SPL Simplifies the Workplace

Similarly, AVI-SPL improves the workplace by freeing up its people to do more of what they’re good at so they and their organizations can grow and succeed. People across different departments don’t have to be experts in meeting-room technology to collaborate with one another. IT doesn’t have to devote its resources to being AV help desk assistants. And companies don’t have to go it alone in keeping up with the latest technology solutions.

As I’ve learned over the course of nine years with the company, our client projects are guided by a long-term view, one that seeks to understand how new solutions will affect an organization’s network and infrastructure, how the company sees itself changing, and how its market may change. In the discovery process with the client, AVI-SPL listens to their needs and begins a conversation about how to think strategically about implementing AV, video collaboration and UCC solutions. Along the way, account managers, technicians and engineers share the knowledge that answers many client questions, including:

The Customer Advisory Board developed from AVI-SPL’s need to understand the issues facing today’s companies so that it can continue to be a partner that delivers high value. The role of AI in the workplace is one of those challenges. By understanding the role artificial intelligence plays and will play in a customer’s environment, AVI-SPL continues to develop technical skills and thought leadership in this area. Wherever AI may be relevant to a company’s growth, that knowledge gives AVI-SPL the ability to present a high-level strategy that leads to digital workplace transformation.

Read “Why AI Will Make Collaboration Experts of Us All” >

To view our Partner blog, click here

Case Study: Business Development Bank of Canada

AV Everywhere

BDC, the Business Development Bank of Canada, wanted its new Montreal headquarters to be a place for what it calls “social collisions” — areas that invite collaboration and knowledge sharing among team members. AVI-SPL’s design and integration work aligned with BDC’s desire to work in spaces that inspire collaboration and lead to improved innovation.

The new headquarters now has areas that promote entrepreneurship among its employees and offer its clients a space where they can interact with their representatives while collaborating over shared content. And those in the head office can quickly and easily connect with colleagues at other branches for video collaboration and content sharing.

Your company may have discovered that its current collaboration solutions aren’t delivering the expected user experience or needed outcomes. I encourage you to take a look at this case study and see what’s possible.

Read the BDC case study >

To view our Partner blog, click here