Case Studies

A conversation with Steven Turnbull, Technical Services Manager at Otago Polytechnic, about the importance of audio visual technology in education and working with Vision…

How important is the whole area of Audio Visual technology in your organisation?

AV is very important to us. You can't function or operate in the education industry without it. Learners are coming from schools where they have a huge amount of technology involvement in their lives. We’ve really identified the need to carry that on and not drop the ball. So we have heavy investment in technology equipment for students and try to encourage their learning by providing a good environment for them to teach themselves in a lot of cases. It's an emerging trend for students to be teaching themselves more.

In that context how does Vision support you?

They’ve been fantastic. The previous company was just sort of non-existent in terms of customer support. The customer support we get out of Vision is great, they're always at the end of the phone or email, nice and prompt.  They’re able to help with any customisation we need. They're really flexible on how to achieve what’s needed in terms of pricing, but get the job done and get the right outcome.

What about their ability to understand your unique needs?

Daryl has spent quite a bit of time with us on that. We had a large project a year ago where we were retro fitting a historic place and we had a lot of meetings and sessions around coordinating various services such AV and electrical and all that sort of stuff. Daryl and Murray both came down and sat in on those sessions.

They have just got a great ability to listen and understand what the customer’s needs are. And when the going gets tough, because of a set price and other things like that they go out of their way to find alternative methods to achieve the right answer for the client, and stay within budget.

Vision believes one of the most important aspects of what they do is making things easy for customers, do you have a view on that?

Yeah, in the AV world you can go and buy a silver box that can be operated by a two year old, or a silver box that can be only be operated by a techy geek, and I think their ability to understand ‘humanness’ and how it interacts with technology is vital. 

Because it's all very well putting in fantastic, flashy systems, but the majority of our people aren't able to figure it out. Vision have the knowledge and experience to identify if a system won’t be right for the users and make changes so the system does work for them, and it means we know what the expected outcomes are going to be.

Vision’s Organisational Promise is Do it Once, Do it Right. Do you think that rings true?

Absolutely, as I said before, the previous contractor we used, we were forever going around behind him tidying up because it wasn't done right.  We never go around and tidy up behind Vision, when they finish a job they always come back and check it's all done to our expectations. There is never the situation of having to go weeks or months later when something that doesn't work. They're probably one of the few contractors that we ever see with a vacuum cleaner on their back, so I couldn't speak highly enough about them.

What does it mean to you in your day to day job to have a supplier that you can depend on like this?

It's critical. We don't have the time to buddy up with suppliers, those days are long since gone.  We're in a world of set and forget and you want to acquire the outcome first time, every time. You're paying good money for it and the expectations are all there. People just need to understand what their role is, get on and do it and that's certainly exactly what we get out of Vision.

A conversation with Joel Oldridge, (former) Assets & Technology Manager at Otago Museum, about the importance of audio visual technology in his sector and working with Vision…

How important is Audio Visual technology in your organisation?

It’s incredibly important, both from a corporate point of view, for our staff to interact with those elements, and from a venue perspective. Obviously you’ve got the display spaces in the museum, signage and all the other content delivery within the gallery spaces. 

And as a function area we need spaces that are totally professional and sellable. They need to have robust, professional systems that people come in and rely on. That might be for a wedding or a conference, or a high powered speaker, or anything in between. 

So it's fundamental to the actual running of the whole place?

It’s fundamental and becoming more and more important.

We're just investing more and more in that technology. Nowadays every exhibition we put together relies AV technology or we seem to be putting more and more AV components into it, and the interaction aspect is becoming more required as well. 

How important to you is a company like Vision in this context?

Vision are incredibly important because we rely on them from the start of scoping what we want to do and experience or feel that we want to deliver. We may be able to go and do some research ourselves but having Vision involved from an early point in that scoping is really helpful because they're in the industry full time and that's what they do professionally. They provide us with some really good ideas and help us actually create the solution, and then from there they deliver the actual solution. So they’re really helpful for us to have involved all the way through the process.

What makes them good or better than anyone else in the sector?

I guess really understanding that we're unlike most other businesses around town, and they’ve taken the time, especially Daryl has taken the time to be on the ground here understanding the core needs of the museum and what we're trying to do, and then create solutions to fit. That relationship has just been very well established.

So they're very good at understanding your unique needs?

Yes, definitely. I mean sure we maybe a space where somebody can come and have a lecture but actually we're a lot more than that as far as the type of funding that we get. How we operate from a corporate point of view, the gallery spaces and the multi-use nature of a lot of our areas is quite different than a lot of spaces.

Vision believes one of the most important aspects of what they do is making things easy for customers, do you have a view on that?

Yeah totally.  We aren't lucky enough to have fulltime audio visual techs on board installing, trouble shorting and dealing with all of that. We just can't afford to have those people around. So with the limited resources we have we rely on smart solutions that are robust. So that’s certainly what they give us and we know the support is there from Vision if we need it. But ultimately they set it up so it’s pretty easy on the user interface level.

Does Vision open your eyes to new solutions and options that you aren't aware of?

Totally. That's what I said before about them being involved from the scoping stage. We’ll say look this is what we want to do, is it possible? How do we go about doing it? And then we can work towards scaling it to suit us. So it’s really important that they're involved and they help out with that.

Vision’s Organisational Promise is Do it Once, Do it Right. Do you think that rings true?

Yes I would say so. In every job things can go wrong, but they certainly don't do a half job and they're there till the end, and there is always follow up to make sure the outcome is exactly what we wanted. We work on projects with them and they are there all the way through and are providing continued support a year down the track which is fantastic, so yes absolutely

What does it mean to you in your day to day job to have a supplier that you can depend on like this?

The reality is you only really get feedback when it doesn't work. For me sitting in the management team, I am accountable for all of our audio visual. So ensuring that its really top quality and working all the time certainly affects my performance and how I am judged basically. 

When we needed to set up multiple TVs, we called Vision and were most impressed with their quick response. Their service was brilliant, there was a great range of products to choose from and the staff were just lovely. One of the techs sorted out a very messy area of wires and did a great job. They really exceeded our expectations.

We found it miraculously easy to deal with Vision. Their two techs were very impressive from their tireless work ethic to how they managed to work around our guests. Nothing was too much trouble and they were able to easily find solutions for unexpected problems. If you need audio visual solutions in your business, we would thoroughly recommend Vision.

The team at Vision is what sets this company apart. We have a lot of time for technicians Cam and Phil who actually arrived when they said they would and were excellent to deal with from start to finish. The product and service they provided has proven to be excellent with great picture quality and all aspects of the system working exactly as we hoped.