AmTrust modernises its office to drive employee productivity

The challenge

AmTrust International wanted to streamline its operations to provide staff with a more agile and productive working environment.

Kinly worked with Artemis Interiors and AmTrust International to deliver over 30 flexible ‘plug and play’ presentation rooms, 2 video conferencing rooms, 1 high-end boardroom and a state of the art ‘town hall’ area, to create a seamless user experience.

Employees can now collaborate in ways that they were not able to do before, bringing staff together and enabling better cross team collaboration to drive productivity.

In 2018, AmTrust International was looking to consolidate its London office space from four buildings to one, with the goal of bringing 500+ employees under one roof for a more agile and modern way of working.

Following a successful meeting, AmTrust International appointed Kinly as its AV partner to deliver a series of world class integrated AV solutions that would help its clients and teams communicate more efficiently.

The solution

Kinly worked closely with Artemis Interiors and the client to understand the technical requirements for the new office space, which would emulate a friendlier and more open environment. One of the main challenges of the project was having to carefully decommission all of the client’s existing technology from the other office locations, ensuring that the existing equipment was modern enough to integrate with new systems, before delivering, installing and testing in the chosen 38,000 sq. ft. building in the City of London.

We installed over 30 flexible ‘plug and play’ presentation rooms, 2 video conferencing rooms, 1 high-end boardroom and a state of the art ‘town hall’ area, all split over three levels.

Situated on levels three and five, are thirty modern huddle spaces and small meeting rooms all equipped with wall mounted displays and HDMI cables for employee’s to meet, collaborate and present seamlessly. The three video conferencing rooms, including a 10 person meeting space, an executive meeting room and a boardroom, are used by the senior management team for important client and stakeholder meetings. The rooms all feature high quality Cisco video conferencing, large wall mounted display screens as well as Shure ceiling array microphones, to deliver crystal clear video and sound.

The result

Taking centre stage is AmTrust International’s open plan town hall facility that boasts an impressive 3.5m x 1.5m video wall used to capture the attention of clients, prospects and employee’s. A lot of thought and careful consideration went into the designing and installation of the video wall due to strict guidelines on network connectivity. The space is used by brokers, underwriters and the CEO for corporate presentations, bespoke events and live company updates. When the CEO is presenting on level 1, his presentation is streamed onto 3 different repeater screens located on levels three and five to ensure everyone can attend the event.

When the video wall and repeater screens are not being used for live events, digital content like weather and travel updates, annual sporting events like Wimbledon as well as business and market updates from Bloomberg are displayed on the screens using Tripleplay’s IPTV and digital signage.

“Being able to bring events in house is one of the major benefits of this solution from a cost saving and logistics point of view. In the past we would have to find and hire an external venue that could accommodate over 500 people, which was a huge expense,” says Carolyne King, Group Real Estate & Facilities Manager, AmTrust International.

“Since relocating to the new office space the feedback from staff has been great,” says Carolyne King. Employees can now collaborate in ways that they were not able to do before, bringing staff together and enabling better cross team collaboration.

Staff no longer have to call IT to help with the setup of meetings, which means meetings and presentations are now seamless, providing a much better user experience.

The video wall is very popular with staff as it helps to attract new talent and clients by bringing a bit of pizazz to the office environment. It is so popular that even the marketing team have started to plan ahead for all the big events of 2020.

Following on from the project, Kinly continues to work with AmTrust International by providing technical, event and maintenance support for the equipment.