Background
In today's work culture of deeper collaboration between teams across offices, meetings are an integral part of almost every productive endeavor. However, a study shows that companies waste 2,100 hours per year to look for meeting rooms, meaning many organizations are suffering from ineffective meeting room utilization. Employees usually need to jump around between meeting rooms to check room availability or to see if the rooms are double-booked, which leads to a negative impact on employee productivity in the offices and also on the brand image. An IT corporation in Israel houses over 10,000 employees turned to Winmate for a smart conference room management HMI solution. They wanted to deploy an HMI that was able to be integrated with their meeting room management system so as to optimize the asset utilization while improving the access control and security.
Challenge
The HMI needed to be stylish to fit into the office’s modern interior design. It should contain a highly reliable, yet low power consuming processor for real-time data exchange to offer an instant overview of all the meeting rooms and resources. The company wanted the device to come built with light bars emitting programmable colors to show if a room is occupied or not, and with an RFID reader to act as the smart card access controller. PoE function was necessary when it came to reducing the installation costs and power consumption.
Solution
Winmate provided 10.1” S Series HMI - W10IB3S-PCH2AC-PoE with Intel ® Celeron® N2930 CPU that suited the IT company’s need of premium computing performance and efficient power consumption. A user-friendly touch experience was guaranteed thanks to the PCAP multi-touch screen. Its support for Power over Ethernet (PoE) power input met the demand of the company looking to increase the operational efficiencies by reducing cabling costs and power consumption. Speaking of access control methods, the W10IB3S-PCH2AC-PoE included two programmable LED light bars on both sides |
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| S Series HMI with RFID function gives a better meeting room management |
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| to show a specific color for different statuses. Apart from that, it was configurable with RFID reader as the smart card access controller, and with front-facing camera for entry verification from the control side, tightening the security functions. Last but not the least, the S Series HMI was front IP65 rated water and dust proof, offering industrial-grade protection in a sleek, compact form factor. |
Result
The IT corporation deployed 300 units to serve as the meeting room management HMI. With the new solution in place, meeting room management is made easy. From the HMI located outside each conference room, employees get to check the current status of the room in a glance, make/cancel room reservation, order audio/visual equipment or catering, etc. With the RFID function, the room management system can adjust the environment to the user’s pre-set preferences like temperature or illuminance. Moreover, the statistics of room utilization gives the company invaluable insights into how its assets are actually used and enables the firm to come up with long-term strategies to reduce operational costs and increase sustainability.
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