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Leading Belgian construction company enhances collaboration with Lifesize video conferencing solutions

 Group Renotec restores and renovates buildings, monuments, artwork, and more in Belgium and the surrounding area. With over 30 years of experience and a team of 730 employees, Group Renotec utilizes traditional knowledge and innovative techniques to take on even the most complex projects, from renovating and repurposing historic buildings to managing the challenges of an urban road and piping project.

Group Renotec logo

“The high-quality video delivered by Lifesize means that video meetings feel like in-person meetings”

— Guy De Knaep, IT Manager at Renotec

Challenge

 With six office locations throughout Belgium, the ability to communicate and collaborate across all sites was essential for Group Renotec. To stay connected, team members traveled for in-person meetings and used several Polycom Trio solutions at each office location for video conference calls. 

However, the Polycom solution often required set-up prior to each video conference meeting, the connection was frequently unreliable, and the system was not intuitive for users to set up, use, and troubleshoot, creating lost time and frustration. Group Renotec needed an easy-to-use, reliable video solution to communicate and collaborate with team members throughout the organization. 

Solution

To help solve these challenges, Group Renotec enlisted Belgium-based IT solutions provider BKM. After exploring the options available, BKM recommended Lifesize as the best solution for Group Renotec’s connectivity needs. “The Lifesize solution is very easy to use and delivers a high-quality video conference experience without connection errors or other glitches,” said Diederik Beckers, document and visual project manager at BKM. “These attributes were vital for fulfilling Group Renotec’s needs.” 

With support from BKM, Group Renotec purchased one Lifesize Icon 700, two Lifesize Icon 300s, and five Lifesize Icon 450 video conferencing systems, placing a Lifesize solution into a conference room at each office location. To ensure easy access by their team, Group Renotec also enabled Lifesize’s single sign-on for integration with their Active Directory services. 

Initially, frustrations created by the prior Polycom solution caused some hesitancy from the Group Renotec team in using video conference meeting tools. However, with Lifesize in place connection errors and system glitches have become a thing of the past. 

After experiencing the easy-to-use Lifesize solution, the number of video conference meetings has grown and video meetings have become an integral way for the Group Renotec team to communicate and collaborate between offices. The COVID-19 pandemic has since spurred even more use, with team members accessing the Lifesize app frequently to stay connected while stay-home orders are in place.

The addition of Lifesize has provided a high-quality, stable, easy-to-use video conference solution, leading to increased efficiency and productivity throughout the company, saving time and reducing travel needs. 

“The high-quality video delivered by Lifesize means that video meetings feel like in-person meetings,” said Guy De Knaep, IT Manager at Renotec. “We still travel in some cases, but as a collaboration tool for our team Lifesize can’t be beat.” 

Outcome

Since moving to Lifesize, Group Renotec has experienced overall cost savings through improved productivity and saving their team valuable time. Setting up and running video conferences with remote teams is now easy and stable, and with the ability to quickly join high-quality video conferences the team has reduced travel to and from the six site locations saving time and travel costs. With Lifesize already implemented when COVID-19 hit, Group Renotec had a seamless way to collaborate and stay connected from home office locations.

With Lifesize, Group Renotec has a dependable way for distributed offices to collaborate and communicate, opening the door for even more expansion opportunities. Looking ahead, the company plans to add a Lifesize-equipped conference room to each new office location as more sites are added in the future.