Regional, national, and global companies that want a single trusted AV partner haven’t always had many options. Historically, the AV industry was fragmented and primarily comprised of small, regional vendors. Because of this, enterprise-level companies had to string together a network of AV vendors to execute large projects.
But that approach doesn’t scale.
So, we’ve been listening to our enterprise clients to identify what’s most important to them and are transforming our operations to meet their needs better. While our branch model has served AVI very well with the local needs of our customers (and we don’t want to disrupt that), it is important to build a model that also aligns to a rapidly growing segment of new customers and provide them with a consistent experience across their entire AV estate.
Enterprise-level AV implementations start with our employees
Whether you’re in Boise, Dallas, or New York City, we want you to have a consistent experience working with AVI. That starts with the experience we provide to our team in three key areas:
- Onboarding – we’re focused on providing a consistent and impactful, nationwide onboarding experience for every employee owner. We will heavily focus on those roles dependent on delivering consistency to our customers.
- Training and development – we’re working closely with our HR team to deliver workshops and training on important customer experience topics like project management. We have also doubled the number of human resource professionals on our team with new experts who will lead training and development.
- Implementation standards – we’re creating standards for critical aspects of the implementation process—from kickoff meetings and CAD drawings to project management tools and technical support. In order to deliver consistency to our customers and work efficiently across our U.S. regions, it is vital to adopt, train and continuously improve standards from project kickoff to project management and coordination, to final commissioning.
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“Focusing on standards is critical to onboarding, training and development and has the advantage of giving us something to train on, which in turn allows us to provide a more consistent onboarding experience,” says Roger Patrick, Chief Operating Officer at AVI Systems. “The process of standards development is a never ending one as we apply our process of continuous improvement.” |
For example, we recently held a Kaizen event focused on fine-tuning our commissioning process. Commissioning is the final step in a successful integration when we ensure the entire AV system functions exactly as it was designed to driving user adoption.
At the Kaizen event, members of our team representing a variety of delivery roles reviewed our existing processes and documentation, brainstormed where improvements could be made, chose the best ideas, and reworked our commissioning process with the goal of delivering a better customer experience.
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“As a leader, it was rewarding to watch our team get so engaged in every detail and every handoff during the commissioning process Kaizen,” says Paul Mueller, AVI Systems’ Director of Engineering. “We conducted a series of post-event follow-ups to test the proposed changes, and now we’re rolling out the changes in a phased approach.” |
We felt it was important to start with one of the largest impacts to customer success, commissioning. Based on how impactful this process was, it will now become part of our DNA and we will begin prioritizing additional processes and running them through the proven Kaizen formula for success.
Standard AV deployments start with our Regional Deployment Centers and go to the enterprise level with AVI’s Velocity Logistics Center
An important part of AVI’s business consists of custom AV solutions that require heavy engineering, programming and extensive AV technical expertise to design, build, deploy and successfully commission. AVI continues to address these customers with the best trained workforce in the industry located regionally near our customers and performing as much pre-planning, staging and programming as possible in our Regional Deployment Centers.
However, there is a rapidly growing segment of our customers deploying large quantities of fairly simple huddle, small and medium-sized conference rooms across their enterprise, with scale and consistency being the most critical success factors. Our customers tell us they want one trusted partner that provides, AV, IT and Logistics expertise to help them accomplish their goals with modern workspace.
AVI has built a national center of excellence to serve this market. Our new Velocity Logistics Center in Dallas, Texas supports all of AVI’s 33 branch office locations and customers with best-in-class logistics, kitting and deployments of large orders of simple meeting spaces across a customer’s enterprise. This allows our talented and experienced regional resources to focus on the custom and complex AV needs of our customers.
Enterprise tools: We created AVI Vision to encompass the tools we offer today and will develop to provide customers with real-time visibility and transparency around their AV estate. Our Program Management dashboard provides customers with real-time access to every project they have underway. It’s also easily customized to optimize workflows and serves as a tool to help them navigate multiple deployments across multiple locations at once. Vision is also an extension and customer interface for our best-in-class ServiceNow platform that provides e-bonding, live monitoring and much more.
Velocity Logistics Center: This Dallas facility is our center of excellence for deployments and logistics. Here, we determine the best logistics and deployment approach for each enterprise deployment, including taking either AVI reference designs or customer standards, piloting and testing them, building very tight installation guidelines, including firmware updates and productizing the experience to drive high volumes of simultaneous installs across a large region, the U.S. or globally.
For example, a major retailer recently needed 200 room systems deployed quickly. Our Velocity Logistics Center team partnered with a highly experienced IT partner, used documented processes, and leveraged a large network of trained resources to plan for and deploy the systems in 45 days—a brisk pace compared to what the average systems integrator can handle. The customer was so satisfied with the implementation that they’ve already awarded AVI a second round of 400 meeting room installs.
“When you combine our Velocity Logistics Center with our network of regional deployment centers, and talented and experienced resources putting the right processes and resources on the right application, AVI Systems can more effectively implement a wide range of AV solutions for our customers,” says Patrick. “And best of all, our customers only have to work with one strategic partner to get it done.”
A strategic business advisor; a proven process
Most technology leaders use a few trusted vendors (e.g., Dell for security, HP for tech, or Microsoft for collaboration tools). At AVI Systems, our goal is to become your strategic business advisor for AV solutions, which are now just as critical to your day-to-day operations as hardware, software, and security.
If you’re responsible for driving workplace strategy and thought you’d have to do all the heavy lifting to implement an enterprise AV solution, we have good news. There is a provider that can help you deploy enterprise AV at scale.
We’re AVI Systems, the largest global audiovisual and unified collaboration systems integrator. With 33 locations in the United States and the ability to do business anywhere in the world. With our proven four-step process, we can help you implement enterprise-level AV solutions of any size. Contact us today to learn how.
©AVI Systems, Inc., 2024
