Global Food & Beverage Retailer

With over 32,000 stores in 80 countries, this Global Food & Beverage Retailer is recognized as a world leader in specialty coffee and teas, and amplifying the modern coffeehouse experience.

The Goal

Multipurpose Studio for a Global Reach

This confidential client contracted ZTransform to help them expedite the design and launch of a multipurpose corporate production studio to fulfill their global reach to its retail stores, partners, employees, and shareholders.

The new studio and its associated control room would need to be ready to produce content in 2 weeks, over a holiday, and during a global pandemic!

And the lockdown made the need for this platform, and the success of this project, that much more critical.

Leveraging our strong relationships with manufacturers was key to procuring the equipment in the time frame needed.

Erik Utter,
founder of ZTransform

The Challenge

Overcoming Lockdown Limitations

The company CEO and executive team were regularly interviewed remotely by various news outlets about the company’s response to the pandemic. The web conferencing platforms used for the interviews lacked the fidelity the CEO desired, so he set out to improve the experience for the team, without exposing staff to third party spaces they could not control.

A secondary use of the space was in support of company communications to over 300,000 global employees, so a robust streaming capability was necessary to meet that worldwide consumption requirement.

The 2-week design/build window would also include product procurement. At this point in the pandemic, vendor representatives were working from home with extremely limited factory support, and both holiday shipping schedules and supply chain challenges were notable causes for concern.

The Solution

A Lean and Efficient Operation

The ZTransform solution involved utilizing existing conference spaces as a temporary studio and control room.

With a minimum number of essential staff available as the on-site production team, robotically controlled studio cameras, and an efficient, 2-operator control room model was designed. The equipment racks, control desks and system cabling were designed to eventually be housed in purpose-built studio facilities, and were included therein once a formal construction process could be achieved post-pandemic.

ZTransform provided equipment configuration, commissioning, performance testing, and operator training to ensure the Operators were confident directing high quality productions with such lean staffing. All of this was performed while abiding by the strict city and state health and safety guidelines.

The Result

Everything, and More

The system’s comprehensive design, and the agile workflows built to quickly reconfigure the studio for the various production needs, gave the Operators total confidence in their ability to deliver a high quality experience to every audience type.

Access to the studio space immediately down the hall from the C-Suite meant the studio can be leveraged for productions well beyond its original, urgent need. This highly efficient and configurable space provides significant value to the company, its staff, and its shareholders.

We’re proud to have been invited in on this project for such a globally recognized brand – and more importantly to deliver on time despite all the challenges we were up against.

Erik Utter,
Founder of ZTransform

Key Technologies

Technologies and brands provided with this project included:

Planar 9 x 36 LED Wall
Teams & Zoom Integration
Ross Carbonite Switcher
Ross xPression Graphics
OpenGear processing
Panasonic cameras
Fujinon Lense
TVU Networks
LiveU
ClearCom intercom
Autoscript Teleprompter
Lightpanels and ETC lighting
Yamaha and Shure audio

Robotic Camera Control

Web Stream Encoding and Decoding

Cellular Bonding Technology

Key Services

Engineering & Design

Design included build-to system functionals, and wirelisting package with pinout details.

Systems Integration

ZTransform provided all fabrication, Installation, and test services.

Operational Readiness

Launch support included configuration management and training services.

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