INTRODUCTION
Established in 1959, Hy Cite’s success story began in Madison, Wisconsin, out of a garage, where they purchased, warehoused, and distributed a cookware line. Today, Hy Cite has three well-known, premium cookware lines, including Royal Prestige, which are exclusively sold by authorized distributors in the U.S., Canada, and numerous countries throughout Latin America, Europe, and Asia.
THE CHALLENGE
For its brand-new 90,000 square-foot corporate headquarters in Middleton, Wisconsin, Hy Cite wanted to outfit 40 rooms with intuitive video conferencing, wireless presentation, and room scheduling technology that would help foster greater employee engagement, collaboration, and productivity.
THE SOLUTION
Hy Cite worked closely with Shaun Trudell, President at Automation Arts, to bring all 40 spaces, comprised of meeting rooms, training center, and executive boardrooms, to life with Crestron technology. “We have so many dynamic spaces in our building,” says Sellek. “Our team really wanted to help enhance them with technology that would not only provide our employees with a better working experience, but also ensure easy setup and configuration for the IT team.”
THE TECHNOLOGY
The rooms that required video conferencing capabilities were all equipped with Crestron Flex systems, which provide staff with a flexible, simple BYOD solution. Staff can easily plug in their laptops and start their meetings with just one touch. “Crestron Flex provides us with an easy to deploy conferencing device that our people love to use,” explains Sellek.
Another reason Hy Cite standardized on Crestron Flex is its built-in advanced room scheduling capability. Crestron Flex connects directly with the company’s room scheduling application to make it easy. Inside meeting rooms, the built-in graphics engine generates an onscreen display of the room calendar and simple instructions to start a meeting. “With Crestron Flex all of our spaces are highly collaborative workspaces and provide our people with infinite visibility to the room’s availability throughout the day,” says Sellek. Additionally, with Crestron AirMedia® wireless presentation technology deployed in each space staff can now connect their personal devices to the room display wirelessly to share content. The facility also includes larger meeting spaces where executives did not want to have any devices on the table. To accomplish this Greg and his team deployed AirMedia and DM NVX® AV-over-IP technology, which distributes flawless video content over the network. The DM-NVX-D30 network AV decoder mounts discretely behind the room displays and transforms them into DM NVX endpoints.
An HD camera at the front and microphones located in the ceiling also keep technology off the table. Audio and video control are simple using the Crestron touch screen mounted on the wall in each room. Each room features the same intuitive user interface so everyone can get right down to business, instead of wasting precious time trying to get the technology in the room to work. “By standardizing on Crestron, we are able to deliver a consistent and seamless user experience as employees travel throughout the office,” says Sellek. For Shaun and his team, having a tool like .AV Framework™ software available helped alleviate the typical pain points of programming and designing custom GUIs for multiple devices. “.AV Framework allowed us to quickly and easily duplicate GUIs for each Crestron Flex unit,” says Trudell. “This tool saved my team a tremendous amount of time.”
RESULTS
With an assist from Crestron, Hy Cite has built a work environment where technology facilitates and encourages greater collaboration and frees up more time to create and develop new ideas. As the company continues to grow and more meeting spaces are introduced, the scalable Crestron platform is perfectly suited to provide the AV technology backbone.
