As a value-add distributor Midwich understands the importance of services and the critical role data plays in enabling these services. By design, it already has a tool to offer to the AV channel that is ready to be applied to installations and projects.
“Concierge is one of the most relevant offerings in our product portfolio when it comes to gathering data in the context of AV deployment and the proceeding functions and analysis required to make that data actionable,” says Karen Eastmure, APAC marketing director at Midwich.
Concierge Displays is an innovative and flexible display-panel solution for meeting room information and bookings that helps maximise the productivity of on-premises resources.
“The core product is a display that goes on the front of the room to indicate whether it is occupied as well as what is happening in the room on that day but on the back end, it is primarily an analytics tool. It can monitor who
is coming into the space, how long it is booked for, whether the meeting was attended and if not, it will cancel the meeting on their behalf,” explains Damien Vanslambrouck, director marketing and sales at Concierge.
“To many, Concierge seems like a standard run-of-the-mill room booking and scheduling solution but what goes on under the hood sets it apart,” Vanslambrouck says. “Actually, the room booking component of the product came before the hardware component. Concierge realised that the data is more important than the display and this was the driving factor in product development. Monitoring the floor space and making sure facilities are being used is becoming more and more important and then you can use analytics, tables and graphs which allow you to review the data and glean insight.”
The focus on data translates to direct benefits for the end user and real-world examples include a corporate installation in Melbourne, Australia where data analysis
helped the company arrive at an economical solution that better suited its business needs, which were quite different to their perceived requirements.
“Concierge was deployed at a corporate facility in Melbourne with multiple meeting spaces and facilities. The end user was considering increasing the number of meeting rooms because the feedback from employees was they couldn’t get bookings. Before committing to expanding the space, which would have cost an increase of AUD 60,000 per year in rent, the end user decided to look at the data to better understand the meeting space usage.”
The data showed only a small selection
of rooms was actually being used 95% of the time while the rest of the meeting spaces were being used 40% of the time. The data also clearly showed the most popular rooms were the larger 8-person or 16-person meeting rooms with full AV packages. Smaller meeting rooms were less popular.
“Access to data and the right analytics delivers a surprising level of accountability,” says Eastmure. “Insights available with the Concierge system help end users make the right decisions regarding investments in technology and facilities and can also highlight the immense value and ROI that effective AV systems bring to businesses.”