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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 >

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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” >

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Webinar Recording: Managing Your Networked Audio Systems

AV Everywhere

If you’re thinking about getting new audio solutions for the workplace or want to take better control of those you already have and trust, management of those devices needs to be a key part of your project plan. In this webinar, Chris Fitzsimmons of Biamp explains the value of SageVue, a monitoring and management tool that works with Biamp solutions like Tesira and Devio. He’ll help you understand important topics like:

  • Deployment needs
  • System architecture
  • Security capabilities
  • Key features of SageVue

You’ll also hear from Laurie Berg, AVI-SPL director of services product management, who explains the benefits of AVI-SPL’s monitoring and management application, Symphony.

Get the recording for “SageVue – Manage Your Biamp Solutions With Confidence” >

 

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AVI-SPL Symphony a Finalist for SCN Award

AV Everywhere

AVI-SPL Symphony is a finalist for the SCN Installation Awards’ Most Innovative IoT Product. It is now up to you to vote for the winner.

Symphony is the managed services platform that automates the scheduling, launching, management, and experience of your meetings. It gives you global control of your AV and UC estate from a web-based portal. Symphony also provides custom reports that share valuable information like room usage, quality of experience and device status, all of which your team can use to determine ROI and meet business objectives.

Vote for Symphony

Please take a moment to vote now for Symphony. The category is the sixth question in the online form. You do not have to vote in every category.

Thank you for your time and your vote for Symphony!

VOTE NOW

Winners will be announced at InfoComm 2019.

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Q&A on Supporting Productivity in the Workplace

AV Events

Beau Wilder of Poly is an expert in what companies can do to shift their organizations toward the future of work. In the Q&A below, I spoke with Wilder, Poly’s VP of innovation waves and new products, about creating a workplace that enables people to be their best. 

Q: Why is workplace transformation so important?
Wilder: We’re all in this war for talent. The companies winning are the ones recognizing that their most important assets are their people.

We can work anywhere, anytime on any device using UCC technology. Those solutions have allowed work policies to be flexible, so we need spaces where we can make best use of that technology and its capabilities. If you don’t provide those spaces, people will vote with their feet and move on to a better situation.

Q: Considering the ability for people to work from anywhere, how important is the workplace?
Wilder: Even though research shows people are more productive at home, most choose to go back to work because they miss the collaboration. We want people to work together and feel empowered when they’re in the office. It’s that cross-pollination where new thinking happens. We’re always looking for the next big idea, and so we need to make it easier for people in the workplace to work together.

Q: How did the open office take hold as the new template for the workplace?
Wilder: We thrive as humans when we’re outdoors. The open office offers flexibility in creating an environment that mirrors the one outside. In these spaces, we’ve seen huge trends with health and wellness. Biophilic design that includes natural light and greenery sets people up to be their best. When people are happier and healthier, you have more productivity and creative output. But the open office comes with its own set of challenges.

Q: What are some of those challenges?
Wilder: Although companies have raced to open offices, some didn’t do it thoughtfully. It can be hard to work while people are collaborating near you. Therefore, we need to focus on a human-centric design in the office so we can be at our best by using technology that blends distracting speech into the background.

Q: What are the solutions for these challenges?
Wilder: Do your homework ahead of time and bring in your vendor partners early. You’ll also want to include your users in the journey toward workplace transformation. Focus on the human experience above the cost-savings. Collaboration in meeting spaces should be intuitive and easy. When you design for open spaces, consider the activity that will be happening and build in choice that allows for a personalized experience.

Q: What’s a realistic expectation for companies that want to transform their workplaces?
Wilder: Ask targeted questions of your staff. Find out where things aren’t working. As you design open spaces, let the technology do the heavy lifting. 

This process continues even after you’ve made the transformation. Understand that you won’t get your building right from day one. But by collecting data like occupancy and use of technology, you can be proactive in refining it.

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The Four S’s Are Your Keys to Collaboration Success

AV Everywhere

You want your workplace to be more than a building where people are obliged to meet for at least eight hours a day. It should be a home where teams can share and build upon ideas that help your company grow. To create the spaces that inspire your workers, AVI-SPL follows the “four S’s”: simple, standardized, scalable and serviceable. Each of these guidelines work together to form the workspaces that help meet your organization’s desired outcomes. Below, we look at what each of these principles means, why they matter, and how they work together.

Simple, Standardized, Scalable, and Serviceable

Simple — Are you going to use a conference room where the technology is an obstacle course of complexity, unreliability, and frustration? If you’re inclined to use a collaboration space, you want to work with colleagues on a project, not wonder why you can’t get the interactive display to sync to your device.

To apply simplicity to a space doesn’t mean you’ve limited its capabilities. Rather, you’ve removed the complex barriers to using and benefiting from those capabilities. This is usually the meaning when you hear someone describe a technology system as “frictionless.” Starting a meeting is streamlined, so that you can quickly start the display, audio, video, presentation, and get the purpose of the meeting underway.

Standardized — Regardless of where you’re working from, the technology experience needs to be the same among similar rooms in all locations. An employee that knows how to use a collaboration room in his or her home office should be able to do the same in another regional office. Applying standards and best practices makes the experience simple for the end user. Some of our clients have room standards that AVI-SPL must deliver reliably and in a way that allows their organizations to grow.

If you’ve yet to settle upon standards, AVI-SPL can help develop and provide them through its Rapid Rooms and Smart Spaces. These are collaboration spaces of various types that have been preconfigured with essential collaboration tools for various group sizes.

Your regional requirements may mean substituting one solution for another based on product availability. AVI-SPL lets customers know how their budgets may fluctuate based on those regional preferences. Because we are aware of differences within the same company, our designers, programmers and integrators ensure that your room functionality is consistent across locations.

Scalable — A scalable set of solutions are easily repeatable from office to office. By keeping room solutions simple and standardized, we can quickly deploy your rooms so that your regional locations stay connected. As your company grows and adds more collaboration spaces and solutions, so does AVI-SPL’s support of those solutions and your user experience through our managed services.

Serviceable — AVI-SPL considers serviceability as a design element when developing standards for your rooms and technology systems. That’s because spaces that are easy to use should also be easy to support. We assess the network topology where the solutions are being deployed so that the IT stakeholders can deliver and support the solutions on a consistent basis.

Serviceability means IT and/or  your managed services provider can proactively resolve issues and acquire the analytics that provide business insights, like how often your collaboration spaces are being used, the quality of the experience, and the number of service tickets that were generated in a particular time frame. From the data analysis of those standardized rooms, your organization continues to adjust its standards and conference rooms, and improve the user experience.

We find that customers are demanding actionable business intelligence about their collaboration solutions. They want to know if their technology systems are delivering ROI by improving productivity and if they need to reconfigure their collaboration spaces. AVI-SPL’s Symphony managed services platform provides the analytics to let you know whether your systems are delivering their intended value.

Work With the Experts in the Collaborative Workplace Experience

By following the four S’s, AVI-SPL creates meaningful spaces and better workplace experiences. Contact AVI-SPL and let us know where we can help improve the business outcomes for your organization.  

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