Reducing Costs with Flexible Meeting Spaces

The client partnered with New Era Technology to redesign their workplace collaboration environment with a focus on reducing meeting room costs and improving space efficiency through flexible meeting spaces and hybrid work enablement.

The objective was to move away from static, underutilized meeting room setups and instead create a more dynamic workplace environment where spaces could be monitored, managed, and adapted based on real usage. This included improving visibility of room utilization, enabling desk and room booking, and reducing unnecessary operational and support costs across the collaboration estate.

We were tasked with creating a turnkey solution to enable internal and external communication and collaboration; a seamless user experience, and an attractive workplace for Burlington’s employees. 

The organization faced growing challenges in managing its collaboration environments effectively across multiple offices:

• Meeting rooms and workspaces were often underutilized or booked but not actively used
• Lack of real-time visibility into how spaces were being used across the organization
• Inefficient processes for booking desks and meeting rooms
• High operational effort required to support and maintain collaboration technology
• Frequent reliance on manual intervention or on-site support to resolve issues
• Limited ability to analyze workspace usage and plan future office layouts effectively

These issues resulted in increased costs, reduced efficiency, and a lack of strategic insight into how office space was actually being used.

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.

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