Case study

Pronestor Customer: Yarra Valley Water

Yarra Valley Water began refurbishing their buildings and transitioning from an “office and cubicles” layout to an Activity Based Workplace and the old “book a room through Outlook” paradigm wasn’t working for them anymore. A better way to manage meeting rooms as required. With meeting rooms spread around four buildings, it was crucial to YVW to find a solution providing central administration to avoid any potential support nightmare.

1600X900 Customer Logo Yarra Valley Water
“Yarra Valley Water has around 150 meetings a day, of which about 30% are spontaneous and the remaining meetings are pre-booked. Because all our rooms are now back on line we no longer have much contention. No-shows are down to less than 5% of all bookings.”
–Yarra Valley Water

The challenge

Yarra Valley Water (YVW) is the largest of Melbourne’s water corporations with 600 employees providing water supply and sewerage services to more than 1.7 million people and 50,000 businesses.

In 2012 they began refurbishing their buildings and transitioning YVW from an 'office and cubicles' layout to an Activity Based Workplace (ABW). During the refurbishment many meeting rooms were unavailable for extended periods, and competition for available rooms was high.

Yet many bookings went unused due to 'no shows', and staff struggled to find an available meeting room even though rooms were empty. The old 'book a room through Outlook' paradigm wasn’t working for them anymore.

A better way to manage meeting rooms was required.

“We are shifting our company into Activity Based Working, which is all about open plan, versatile seating and lots of collaboration. That means we need lots of meeting spaces, available at short notice, and the Pronestor displays help us optimize the use of our meeting rooms. Staff loves the convenience of spontaneous bookings, and it is very easy to see from a distance which rooms are free because of the clear colour coded display. Pronestor Display has been a definite win for Yarra Valley Water.”
–Leigh Berrell - CIO & GM of Business Technology Service, YVW

The ABW way of working is all about quick spontaneous meetings, which requires that empty rooms can be quickly booked, in real time, and that everyone can easily find an available meeting room.

With 35 meeting rooms spread around four buildings it was crucial to YVW that any future meeting room management solution provided staff with the ability to book a room on the spot, while providing central administration to avoid any potential support nightmare.

YVW embarked on a search for a suitable display solution and originally tried solutions that used custom displays and had complex ways of interfacing with MS Exchange. These solutions were quickly rejected.

 

The result

Following their poor experience with custom displays, YVW started looking into the possibility of using wall mounted iPads. They tested a few different solutions before settling on Pronestor Display.

Features like central administration, hardware independence, meeting confirmation requirements and automatic cancelation of noshow meetings, spontaneous booking features, full design flexibility, and Pronestor Kiosk Browser clinched the deal.

1600X900 YVW Booking Display

“The displays are providing us great value. Staff has changed their habits to use the displays for spontaneous 'walk up bookings' instead of booking through Outlook. The fact we have a choice means everyone can work the way that suits them best.”

With features such as no-shows cancelation and attendance confirmation YVW is now getting the most out of the available meeting rooms. Furthermore they now know which rooms are being overused or underused so they can make any necessary changes to balance the load across all rooms.

“When meetings are automatically cancelled by Pronestor Display, they are clearly flagged in Exchange as 'no shows' so we can easily follow up with any staff who are serial offenders in booking rooms and not showing up."



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