Reducing Costs with Flexible Meeting Spaces

Burlington Coat Factory Brings Collaborative Workspaces to Life

Summary

Burlington Coat Factory (Burlington), headquartered in Burlington, NJ, is a national off price department store retailer with over 500 locations throughout the US and Puerto Rico. When Burlington set out to construct their new headquarters, they knew they wanted a facility that expressed their brand, provided room for a growing staff, as well as collaborative work space for staff and vendors.

Challenge

To create a turnkey solution to enable internal and external communication and collaboration, a seamless user experience, and an attractive workplace for Burlington’s employees.

Solution

New Era designed and implemented an integrated solution including large format displays, digital  signage, room control, video conferencing & recording, speakers, microphones, and projection solutions.

Process

When Burlington set out to construct their new headquarters, they knew they wanted a facility that expressed their brand, provided room for a growing staff, as well as collaborative work space for staff and vendors. Burlington selected New Era, to design, engineer, and integrate a complete turn-key AV solutions for their new facility.

The project included a small, vendor presentation conference room, an executive level boardroom with video conferencing, a large, divisible multi-purpose room with recording capabilities, multiple conference room spaces, a cafeteria, a fitness center, and digital signage throughout the building.

The first floor multipurpose room (MPR) is a large divisible space that, when closed splits the room into three individual training rooms or may be combined to seat up to 420 people. Because of the flexible nature of the multipurpose room, a wide variety of technology was integrated to cover every possible use of the room including a ceiling mounted projector, a ceiling-recessed electric drop-down screen, thirty-six ceiling speakers, an audio system including digital signal processing, acoustic echo cancellation, and sound-reinforcement, a variety of microphones, HD-pan-tilt-zoom cameras, video capture and recording, and touch screen control.

The Burlington cafeteria is not only a place for employees to gather and eat, but also can be used as overflow space for the MPR. Four ceiling-mounted flat panel displays in the cafeteria are used primarily to show cable TV, however they can also  be used to show content from the MPR.

The Burlington boardroom is used for video conferencing and presentation. The room features a large, rectangular table that can seat 20. The space includes a wall-mounted flat panel display, a recessed ceiling-mounted electric screen, a 4000 Lumen projector equipped with an electric scissor lift in the ceiling above the table, connection interface boxes for presenters, ceiling  speakers, ceiling microphones, essential audio processing equipment, a Precision HD camera, a  videoconferencing codec and touchscreen control. The video conferencing equipment transforms the projection screen into a sleek and powerful telepresence system.

Burlington’s goal at the onset of the project was to empower their employees with adequately equipped space for collaboration and presentation. There are numerous rooms throughout the installation that meet and exceed that goal including training rooms, multiple conference rooms of various size, interview rooms, vendor show rooms, and EVP offices featuring a variety of technology dependent on user need. These technologies include wall-mounted flat panel displays, connection interface boxes for presenters, ceiling-mounted speakers, touch panel control, and several of the rooms include video conferencing capabilities.

Outcome

By working hand in hand with Burlington, New Era successfully produced a sleek, modern workspace for employees to efficiently meet, present and share ideas. As Senior Account Executive, Mike Morgan concluded, “The project consisted of many spaces, all varying in complexity; however, we needed to coordinate all of the technology efforts with construction progress to stay on schedule. This was not an easy task, but the team at New Era was up for the challenge.”