Yara Valley Water provides water and sewage services for more than 1.7 million people and 50,000 businesses.
Yara Valley Water employs more than 600 people.
Yara Valley Water experienced a high amount of meeting room no-shows.
Display helped Yarra Valley Water reduce their meeting room no-shows to less than 5%.
"We have 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 online we no longer have much contention. No-shows are down to less than 5% of all bookings."
Leigh Berrell — CIO & GM of Business Technology Service, Yarra Valley Water
Yarra Valley Water 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 from an office and cubicle layout to accommodate an activity-based workstyle.
During the refurbishment, many meeting rooms were unavailable for extended periods, and competition for the available meeting rooms was high.
Still, many booked rooms went unused because no one showed up, and at the same time the employees were struggling to find an available meeting room.
The old way of managing their meeting rooms solely in Outlook wasn’t working for them anymore.
"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 displays help us optimize the use of our meeting rooms. The 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."
Leigh Berrell — CIO & GM of Business Technology Service, Yarra Valley Water
An activity-based way of working is all about quick spontaneous meetings. This requires empty rooms that can be booked quickly, in real-time, and released after the meeting ends.
Everyone needs to be able to easily find an available meeting room.
With 35 meeting rooms spread over four buildings, it was crucial to Yarra Valley Water that their future meeting room management solution provided employees with the ability to book a room on the spot while providing central administration to avoid any potential support nightmare.
Yarra Valley Water 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 displays are providing us great value. The 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.”
Leigh Berrell — CIO & GM of Business Technology Service, Yarra Valley Water
After their poor experience with custom displays, Yarra Valley Water started looking into the possibility of using wall-mounted iPads, but they still needed software to interact with them.
They tested a few different solutions before settling on Display.
Features like central administration, hardware independence, meeting confirmation requirements and automatic cancelation of no-show meetings, spontaneous booking features, full design flexibility, and a kiosk browser are what settled it for them.
Display provides Yarra Valley Water with features such as no-show-cancelation and attendance confirmation which lets them get the most out of the available meeting rooms.
Furthermore, they now know which rooms are seeing much use and which rooms remain underused so they can make any necessary changes to balance the load across all rooms.
"When meetings are automatically canceled by 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."
Leigh Berrell — CIO & GM of Business Technology Service, Yarra Valley Water
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