Userful Powers Suffolk Construction Smart Labs' Meeting Rooms

As part of Suffolk’s “Build Smart” initiative, the company has created Smart Labs—collaborative environments that are used to identify, test, and scale new technologies in construction. These labs enable project teams to connect with clients and collaborate to improve the construction experience.

One of the key technological advancements in each Smart Lab is innovative video walls, used to encourage effective collaboration by displaying key performance indicators and additional data visualizations on a screen that everyone can view and interact with.

However, Suffolk ran into a roadblock when the video solution they originally implemented could no longer handle their growing needs. In addition to streaming live video from various different construction sites, Suffolk now required access to a wide library of content and needed to display more than one source on their walls simultaneously. Furthermore, Suffolk’s Smart Lab staff needed to be able to easily control all the content from a tablet.

When Ajoy Bhattacharya, Senior Director of Innovation and New Technology at Suffolk came across Userful’s Visual Networking Platform he was immediately drawn to:

• The ability to pull any type of high-quality content (up to 10k) onto the video wall from a tablet
• The flexibility to divide the video wall into multiple zones and display images and slideshows all at the same time

• The affordability due to its use of a standard PC/Server and network 

Based on these three benefits, Bhattacharya and his team first deployed a Userful video wall in their Boston Smart lab. In the years since Suffolk has rolled out Userful video walls in all seven of their Smart Labs across the nation.

"Not only did it fulfill our requirements, but it did so at a competitive price. Also, being able to access the control panel from anywhere using a tablet was a major selling point, allowing us... to show clients data on the video wall while being able to manipulate it on the go.”

Userful helped Suffolk achieve its vision of innovation with dynamic and flexible video walls in their Smart Labs. As Bhattacharya puts it, “even though other solutions were Windows-based—which is the most common platform—Userful proved to be the most solid. It hasn’t crashed once, while our previous solution crashed many times.” Bhattacharya is not the only Suffolk employee who is elated by the product—Suffolk’s engineers and operators also enjoy the convenience of being able to control the displays and content remotely from a tablet, significantly improving Smart Lab operations.

The Userful video walls have empowered the Suffolk team to explore innovative ways to leverage new technologies, which provides significant value to clients and stakeholders. They display 3D renderings, KPIs to monitor performance, budget, and timeline as well as real-time content from showcase construction projects already underway.

As Suffolk continues to launch Smart Labs throughout the country, Userful’s central cloud-based management capabilities enable the organization to manage and control all its video walls across the country from a single location, allowing collaboration between the different locations and promoting a unified corporate message across their entire visual network, making the video wall technology even more efficient.