Supporting Bupa with collaboration and AV technology to connect over 2,000 employees

The Challenge - The new Bupa office in Salford Quays brings together over 2,000 employees. As part of this move they made a strategic decision to introduce seamless collaboration, digital signage and IPTV. Read of to discover why they selected New Era to deliver this project.

The Objectives

• To have over 2,000 members of staff smoothly transition from their old office to the new office, with no/minimal disruption
• Deliver best in class technology within a single platform and with a single service provider to improve the workspaces within Salford Quays, by changing the mechanism and elements found within each type of room to be suited to the proposed function; meeting rooms, training rooms, client host rooms, reception areas and break out rooms
• The new building at Salford Quays must be open on time, on budget
• Successfully transition to Microsoft Skype for Business as defined in the company strategy, due to the increased accessibility, practicality and financial implications
• Increase the number of people using the intelligent collaboration by promoting flexible working
• To have a fully working and fully supported collaboration service within each meeting space when the doors opened at Salford Quays

The Solution

New Era Technology have been working with Bupa for over 6 years in the UK, providing a managed service, expertise and guidance as they have evolved their collaboration service.

We had previously helped Bupa transition to Skype for Business across the business and understood the challenges they were trying to achieve within this Salford project.

Within the new Salford Quays offices, Bupa required over 30 meeting rooms equipped with Microsoft Skype for Business, and over 60 locations fitted with digital signage.

New Era Technology designed a managed service for Bupa that contained the following:

• A service that helped promote Bupa’s agile and flexible working strategy by integrating the workflows of Microsoft Skype for Business with traditional technology throughout the meeting rooms. This would deliver a consistent experience for both employees and people outside of the organisation when collaborating
• With a range in size of meeting rooms from huddle spaces to larger rooms, New Era Technology’s expert Solution Engineers would design them ensuring that the technology worked in tandem with the proposed multiple functionalities of the spaces
• A state of the art digital signage solution that could perform the multiple required functions within different areas, from call stats to alarm integration, menu boards and television. The signage could deliver 4K content, be controlled in house and by touch screen and used for event triggers
• Fully security encrypted IPTV complete with clustering, failover and the ability to deliver to mobile devices. The IPTV would deliver an improved experience to breakout rooms for employees by providing them with access to certain TV channels
• New Era Technology would provide ongoing support for the collaboration estate and continue our relationship with Bupa to help them with their collaboration strategy going forward; consult, design, build, operate & support

The Results

All the collaboration technology has been installed leaving Bupa with traditional meeting rooms that can hold Skype for Business meetings and/or connect to other services being used outside of their offices by partners or customers. New Era Technology are supporting Bupa using a tiered service model, where the company are using a self-service model, but there is managed conference support if and when it is required.

All of Bupa’s audio and visual equipment is also covered by New Era Technology’s high SLA support and ITIL Service Desk with 24/7/365 cover. This means that should there be any problems, Bupa know exactly who to contact, and there is no need to ring various manufacturers for resolution. This also means that any resolution and/or fix required can be completed quicker and will allow Bupa to continue to collaborate with minimum problems.

The digital signage and IPTV has provided Bupa with the option to do more than they first imagined, delivering a vast amount of functionality options, including improving the breakout rooms for employees, delivering real time stats to the call centres and creating digital menu’s in the canteen areas that can be easily updated.
From Bupa’s point of view, it was a seamless move from their old offices into the new Salford Quays office, with meetings and collaboration able to continue without pause. They have seen an increase in the use of collaboration technology being used for meetings, and employees are satisfied that everything is working reliably and is easy to use, supporting their strategy of agile flexible working through the use of Microsoft Skype for Business.

Bupa have also benefited from having one company look after the entire end-to-end process of collaboration, from the design, through the building and installation, to the ongoing support of the collaboration estate, with regular reviews and further consultation taking place on an ongoing basis.

Salford Quays was a very important move for Bupa and is in fact the largest open atrium, single employer building in Greater Manchester. It is also now the largest concentration of Bupa employees on the planet!!  It was important to us to have a company that we had worked with before, who we knew could work with us to deliver what we needed. New Era Technology were the obvious choice for us, as we know them, we know their experience and expertise and trust them to deliver.

Bupa remain determined to maximise their use of collaboration tools and understand how it benefits our employees in an agile and flexible way, and this also benefits the company in the longer term. We will continue work with New Era Technology to support us in this journey.

Lesley Gattei – Property Programme Manager, Property Team

 More information?

If you would like more information about our collaboration services, please visit our webpage or contact a member of the team for more info.