Future Publishing, the special-interest media group, has rolled out Cisco TelePresence® solutions to generate cost and time efficiencies associated with meetings across their two UK locations.
Future Publishing has two main locations in the UK, one in Bath and another in London. The company, responsible for the UK’s largest tech website, and whose brands include T3, Total Film and Classic Rock, employs around 900 workers across both sites. With editorial, marketing, publishing, advertising and digital staff housed in both offices, meetings across the London and Bath sites take up a lot of time during the working day. Travelling time for each journey takes around 90 minutes, and the company was spending a significant amount of money each year on train tickets.
Future Publishing conducted a full-scale overview of its travel expenditure with an overall aim to improve efficiency, improve staff communications and reduce train travel times.
A large focus of the internal audit was to address the complexity of their current video conferencing systems. Staff were becoming increasingly frustrated with the system and the management team made the decision to implement a unified Cisco TelePresence solution.
Using a standardised video collaboration suite allowed staff to share content in real time and greatly enhanced the speed of editorial decisions. Andrew Hudson, IT project manager at Future Publishing, commented on how the Cisco TelePresence technology benefited the company: “To put the benefits in context, what used to take three meetings and up to nine hours travelling can now happen in one meeting and has dramatically reduced the costs associated with train travel. The benefits of using video collaboration have been reinforced by the management team and staff instantly recognised the cost savings and increased levels of productivity as a result of using the technology.”
As a global publishing house with offices in Australia and America, Future has been impressed with the scalability of Cisco TelePresence as colleagues from across the globe can be connected through one easy-to- use interface.
Andy Chew, director of Sales Collaboration, Cisco, stated, “Future Publishing is a great example of a company that has recognised the transformational effect of Telepresence technology. The solution has streamlined the video conferencing process by making meetings between staff more productive. Collaboration between the London and Bath sites has resulted in a better use of resources and highlighted how natural communication can flourish.”
Future Publishing has been so pleased with the results that the company is planning to add more Cisco TelePresence Movi users to the suite as well as continuing to promote the use of video collaboration across other areas of the business.