QBE Project Advance

COMMERCIAL AV   PRESENTATION TECHNOLOGIES

THE CHALLENGE…

QBE Insurance Group is one of the world’s top 20 general insurance and reinsurance companies, with operations in all the key insurance markets. QBE employ more than 14,500 people in 37 countries.

Split over two floors of their European Headquarters in The City of London, the scope of works included a public facing suite of meeting spaces, reception, flexible Town Hall / events area plus a large flexible dual divisible meeting room. In addition, the main offices benefited from 45 newly created meeting rooms of varying capacities plus AV/VC equipped single office spaces.

THE SOLUTION…

Advance was delivered in three phases over 37 weeks, managed by QBE Corporate Real Estate Team and migrating up to 500 staff temporarily off site at a time. Handover of the last phase was completed in August 2016.

Numerous Cisco VC systems were deployed alongside wholesale AMX controls, centralised DGX matrix backbone as well as in room audio systems, using a combination of QSC amps and processing, interactive screen overlays for collaboration and centralised room booking systems by Condeco.

Corporate Reception

Visitors are greeted by a 5 x screen video ‘window on the world’ display powered by a TVOne video wall processor and fed by Onelan 4K digital signage player.

Brokers Lounge

The reception leads in to the ‘Brokers Lounge’ which hosts a variety of flexible hospitality and meeting zones and transforms into a designated ‘Town Hall’ presentation space when required. We undertook a detailed design challenge to incorporate high quality audio and projection discreetly between the contemporary Hunter Douglas slated wooden suspended ceiling in the area.

A ceiling based NEC PA622U Projector was mounted on a Future Automation lift and was complimented by a 3m wide, tab tensioned, ceiling recessed Dalite screen, complete with five full HD mobile relay screens.

The audio solution combined K-Array KT2 satellites and KU26 Subwoofers providing the full range of coverage split into distinct zones which can be switched on or off in seven zone combinations, depending upon preference of layouts and meetings. All of the Broker Lounge AV functionality is controlled by a single 10″ AMX touch screen

Main Board Room

The main board room consisted of the following systems;

• 2 x wall mounted 75″ Samsung screens and 2 x 65″ relay screens on trolleys
• Panasonic projection system and tab tensioned electric screen
• 18 motorised table based retractable microphones
• Dual tracking Cisco SX80 VC system

Reception, Town Hall & Client Meeting Rooms

Wrapped around the reception area there are a number of client facing meeting rooms, the largest of which is a 14 person dual divisible meeting room with unique ‘Skyfall’ acoustic walling system. This room contains a combination of wired and wireless inputs selectable on the AMX touchscreen in conjunction with two Samsung 75″ HD screens with touch screen overlays, and a Panasonic projection system. All together a very flexible space for separate meetings and or events.

In addition there are two separate 10 person meeting rooms plus three 12 person meeting rooms containing Cisco SX80 speaker track systems.

All areas are also served by four separate Exterity IPTV channels feeding current news and TV channels.

QBE Management Offices

The rest of the floors are split into specific business areas where individual teams are given similar facilities including;

• Centralised breakout area
• A variety of flexible meeting room spaces (ranging in capacity from 2 – 10 persons)
• Cisco v/c systems

Room Booking Solutions

Common to all meeting rooms across the facility is the Condeco room booking system, allowing pre-planned meetings to take place alongside the ability to book rooms ad-hoc. All data is gathered for room usage statistics to be created for monitoring purposes.

Notably all these rooms were booked and in use from 0900 on the first day of business at every handover stage.

THE RESULT…

Peter Stansfield @ Project Advance Programme Manager

Pyramid delivered our integrated AV and VC solutions alongside QBE’s dedicated teams with an exceptional eye for detail, delivering to budget, managing timescales in sometimes challenging situations, working with us to reduce the pressures of migrating a large workforce across numerous sites, and ultimately ensuring that Advance met it’s complicated goals on time, and with complete customer satisfaction.

I could rely on an honest appraisal at all times from Pyramid that often provided me with the clearest impression of the true nature of the situation onsite, in terms of meeting our deliverables. An excellent and dedicated partner.

If you want to find out more about our commercial audio visual services then please do not hesitate to contact a member of our team!

QBE Project Advance, QBE Project Advance, QBE Project Advance

About the author

Kelly Hinchcliffe – Operations Director

Lead Project Manager for corporate audio visual systems design and integration.
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