Academic Work, AW Group, was in search of a visually elegant room display and the ability to book sections of meeting rooms. The latter didn’t exist. So we built it for them.
At AW Group, a family of brands working together to unlock the growth potential of people and companies, meetings are a cornerstone of company culture. Their IT service manager Sami Mohsen guides us to their brand new, spacious office in the northwestern parts of Stockholm.
Outside of each meeting room door there is a Humly Room Display on the wall. The soft, glowing light signals availability. Green means free, red means busy. Anyone can tap the screen of a green display to book that specific room.
While planning their new office, AW Group decided to upgrade their system for meeting room bookings and room displays. And they wanted more flexibility.
“We wanted to be able to book sections of rooms. But that didn’t exist on the market,” says Sami.
We tour their training facilities, where Brights, a part of AW Group, offers professional classes in programming and other competencies in high demand. When their classrooms are empty, they want to use those spaces as meeting rooms. They installed flexible walls to be able to divide larger rooms into smaller spaces.
Through Peter Wedholm, Sales Manager at the reseller JML, Sami got in contact with Johanna Bengtsson, Head of Business Development at Humly. When she heard about AW Group’s requirements for a more flexible booking system, her answer was, “Let us develop it for you.”
“Flexibility is one of our guiding principles,” Johanna explains. “It’s part of our DNA to develop our products together with our customers, in line with their needs and wishes.”
The function that Humly developed is called Room within a room. We walk up to one of the classrooms, and Sami illustrates how it works. He uses the display by the door to book half of the room and we go inside.
“Now our classrooms can be booked either in their entirety or as sections.”
“This type of flexibility helps optimize office spaces, something many companies are looking to do right now, ” Johanna tells us. “Many organizations have begun analyzing their office space usage post-COVID. Very often there are a couple of really big meeting rooms that are only used a few times a week. In those cases, the Room within a room function comes in handy.”
For Sami and AW Group, it was important that the solution they chose should have a clean look, work smoothly and be visually elegant.
“Humly Room Display stands out,” says Sami. ”It really enhances the interior design. And it’s easy to book meetings both in our regular calendar and spontaneously, by tapping the display screen on the spot.”
“That’s how it should be,” Johanna adds. “Users don’t want the hassle of learning a new system. Tech must be intuitive and obvious.”
Hardware and software combined
It was also important for AW Group that Humly delivered both hardware and software.
“That was the only option for us,” says Sami. “We didn’t even speak to other suppliers. It’s worth a lot to have one and the same point of contact.”
“For me,” says Sami, “Choosing a supplier has a lot to do with company culture and personal relationships. It’s a question of trust and being confident that our supplier is prepared to go that extra mile to make our customer experience excellent.”
As we leave, Sami holds the door open and taps the room display, turning the light from red to green.
The AW Group is a family of brands (Academic Work, Brights, Crowd Collective and AW Executive Search) working together to unlock the growth potential of people and companies. Based in Stockholm, they currently have operations in six countries (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland).