The Bureau of Sanitation maintains numerous facilities throughout the Los Angeles area. Sanitation staff has an ongoing need to conduct meetings with other staff at these widespread locations. This necessitates a great deal of employee travel on the Los Angeles freeway system to attend meetings. This wastes valuable employee time and contributes to traffic congestion and air pollution in the LA area. The Citys four sewage treatment plants, for example, are located in Van Nuys, Terminal Island, Playa Del Rey and Glendale. Plant staff has an ongoing need to meet with each other as operations at all of the plants require coordination and standardization to maximize efficiency. The plants at Van Nuys and Glendale are even under the same plant management and those staff must meet several times a week, every week. Video conferencing alleviates some of the problems experienced with regularly scheduled meetings. It makes meetings easier to schedule because there would not have to be allowances for travel time and traffic avoidance. It allows a great deal of flexibility in putting together last minute meetings as well as allowing greater participation without adding traffic. For example, plant operations or maintenance staff can attend a regularly scheduled video conferenced management meeting to report on a particular operations or maintenance issue and then leave the meeting to go back to work without ever having to leave the work site and drive separately to the meeting location. Outside of the initial cost of equipment there are no recurring service charges to provide video conferencing because this system utilizes the Bureaus existing data networks.
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Each room in this project was equipped with multi-media video conferencing equipment. This included a 50 inch plasma screen or projection monitor, DVD/VCR player, audio amplifier, wall mounted speakers, video conferencing camera and base unit, controller base unit and wall mounted control panel. A free-standing presentation rack housed the equipment. The plasma monitor was mounted at the end of the conference table at the height deemed optimal for the particular room. The installations varied slightly due to the size of the room, acoustics, table size, and the rooms floor plan. Larger rooms required external microphones, for example. Smaller rooms used the microphones built into the wall mounted camera. The 12-button control panel was programmed and marked to perform various activities easily with the touch of a button. Activities included: Video conference, Play DVD, and Play VCR. Once initiated the video conference equipment required the video conference remote to make a connection and control the local and remote cameras. The project was completed on 10/31/2007.
To install video conferencing equipment at five BOS locations.
Pursuant to the contract with SCAQMD, the Bureau of Sanitation analyzed video conferencing equipment usage data for the six-month period 5/1/07-10/31/07. The analysis indicated that active utilization of the network during the reporting period resulted in 338 avoided trips totaling 5,477 miles. On average, BOS employees avoided 56.33 trips per month. Fiscally, these figures translated into $5,633 in monthly savings assuming each trip costs approximately $100. There were several lessons learned over the course of the project. Some lessons were purely administrative. For example, this technology is not routine, therefore, it cannot be treated as such. The purchasing employees need to be educated as to what we are trying to accomplish and what this system is. This may have avoided very significant delays in the purchasing process. Also, contractors matter. Beware of glossy brochures and empty promises. Two contractors were involved in these installations. One contractor was excellent and their installations ran without problems. The other contractor was generally non-responsive after they were awarded the bid (low bid). They sub-contracted the job out to a freelancer who did a poor installation job, wouldnt fix problems promptly if at all, wouldnt meet schedule, and had rooms that were plagued with operational problems. This required a lot of City staff time to oversee and resolve problems. Video is easy. Audio is hard. The varying acoustics and differences in the voice levels of people make audio the real challenge in a system like this one. A fair amount of experimentation was needed to find the right audio pickup strategy. Video with audio is much better than audio alone. Once people got comfortable with the system they really appreciated the convenience and the visual feedback that was almost like being there. A face-to-face meeting no longer involved a freeway drive.