Drake Audio-Visual

Drake AV was approached by Welsh Water to provide a solution to this brief. Drake AV had established itself as a preferred supplier to Welsh Water for all AV Services and Equipment and had developed a close working relationship with Welsh Water through many years of supplying AV equipment and Services for hire at corporate events and conferences. Drake AV has one of the finest AV Hire teams in the country, and our trademark quality and attention to detail during every project is the reason our clients continue to use our services and equipment time after time.

To satisfy all the project stakeholders at Welsh Water, Drake AV put together three different Digital Signage proposals that offered a variety of features, infrastructure setup and access control. These were all evaluated through project meetings, onsite demonstrations and meetings with each manufacturer so that no stone was left unturned or untested.

After much deliberation, it was decided that the Onelan Signage System offered the best solution to the team at Welsh Water. This was a combination of the ease of use and powerful capabilities within the system to handle all the extra features Welsh Water wanted to include, as well as
offering the best on-premise enterprise solution and UK based support options and head office. The Onelan system was favoured over cloud-based offerings as it allowed the IT and Network teams to place the Onelan Content Server inside their main server rack, and thus control the network
environments down to the last detail.

The Onelan system enabled Welsh to setup multiple user accounts with varying levels of control over the content on the screen. This ensured that the management could have overall control over content layout, size and theme, whilst handing local users control over text messages and local information items. Combined with Onelan’s extensive Calendar and Scheduling options that allow the Comms team to plan out as far as they can the content and schedule, ensuring they have the ability to deliver their message anytime, anyway. This gives them more time to concentrate on what message to deliver in the most effective way.

The security systems at Welsh Water are naturally as secure as can be, which provided a slight challenge to the design team at Drake AV, in ensuring that live feeds and outside content could be delivered safely into the Signage system without compromising the network.

Welsh Water was provided with onsite training given directly by Onelan’s account representative. This was a 4-hour session which enabled users who had never seen the system before to walk away with the ability to create, upload and schedule content across the network. This was further supported by some onsite commissioning and training on setting up and adjusting the IPTV stream to suit their exact specifications.

The project was delivered within budget and the installation was managed in tangent with the Facilities and Network teams at Welsh Water to ensure successful commission and set up in the most efficient means possible. The pilot was successful and now enables the Comms team to meet the needs of the initial brief laid out at the beginning of the project.