Major car finance provider uses Barco ClickShare to create advanced meeting environments at new UK headquarters

PSA Finance, the finance provider for the Peugeot, Citroën and DS car brands, has opened a new technologically advanced head office, thanks to a successful partnership with leading global technology firm Barco.

The finance company’s purpose-built new headquarters in Redhill, Surrey, has seven meeting room environments fitted out with ClickShare units, from boardrooms and training facilities to meeting rooms and huddle spaces.

Barco ClickShare’s flagship CS-800 product has been deployed in the office’s main boardroom, its training centre and its team room, allowing up to eight users in each space to effortlessly deliver presentations and use touchscreen technology to directly annotate shared content. Four CS-200s are in place in PSA Finance’s general meeting rooms, and a further four CS-100s have been installed in huddle spaces around the main open plan area.

ClickShare was chosen because it would embed the principles of collaboration, communication and connectivity into the heart of the meeting spaces in the new headquarters – creating environments where teams can share information quickly and easily, without being hindered by technical issues.

Boosting productivity

Alex Mayor, PSA Finance’s Technical Services Manager who led the project, says the ClickShare deployment has already had a marked impact on the company – significantly improving the efficiency and productivity of meetings and has been extremely well received by the teams using the technology.

“The response from our teams has been overwhelmingly positive,” said Alex. “Employees have commented not just on the simplicity of the technology, but on how it’s changed the meeting culture at PSA Finance. Teams are now having the right meeting in the right environment, making them far more efficient and effective.”

Philip Stoddart, co-founder and director at coodart – the workplace and AV integration specialists that ran the AV fit-out for PSA Finance – believes that simplicity and intuitiveness is crucial when it comes to office technology: “You need to make everything as simple as it can possibly be for the user. There’s great technology out there that’s incredibly smart – but if it’s not approachable, usable, reliable and consistent for the average user, that technology is ultimately worthless.

“Employees should find using the tech as automatic and instinctive as turning on a light. They should have the ability to use advanced features, without being an advanced user. It’s this that ClickShare excels in.”

Alex adds: “For the IT department, ClickShare has hugely improved our own productivity,we used to see 15-20 tickets created a month purely to solve meeting room tech issues. This is now down to one or two a month, if that – freeing us up to focus on more strategic, value-adding activities.”

Supporting global objectives

PSA Finance has now deployed ClickShare at many of its international offices. A number ofunits are now in use at the company’s meeting rooms around the world, and every employee is set up to be able to use the technology immediately in any location – streamlining collaboration and information when employees travel around the network.

According to Mayor, ClickShare is also helping the company to achieve its longer-term goal of becoming a paperless office environment: “The CS-800 systems that are being used in many of PSA Finance’s larger meeting rooms are eradicating the use of paper whiteboards, as presenters can now directly annotate documents using the touchscreen in the meeting room and share the annotated versions with all attendees. Because it’s off-network, it’s also extremely secure, which is a crucial consideration for our business.”

PSA Finance has also made a strong commitment globally to the professional and personal development of its teams. It runs many training programmes throughout the year for its employees and partners – sometimes delivered internally, sometimes by external partners – about everything from new technologies and processes to major legislative changes and soft skills.

The deployment of ClickShare has, according to PSA Finance Training Manager Rachel Harrison-Ball, been transformational for the business in the delivery of its training programmes: “Everyone who’s come in to deliver training has been so impressed with the new system. It’s not just the ease of use, the features have genuinely added to the training we can deliver. It’s excellent for sharing video content, and being able to annotate and share documents using the touchscreen has been really useful – great for making the sessions more interactive.”

“ClickShare has had a huge impact on me, on our trainers and most importantly on our employees,” concludes Rachel. “I walk around the office now and see people who never presented before standing in front of a room, giving a presentation.  The technology is giving people confidence – motivating and inspiring them to do things they didn’t feel up to before. It’s great to see.”