Standardising 20 Meeting Rooms with Unified AV: Meeting Start Time Reduced from 9 Minutes to Under 1 Minute

The 20 meeting rooms across the 13 floors of the regional headquarters had been equipped over multiple years through a series of uncoordinated procurement decisions. The result was a collection of AV environments that varied dramatically from room to room:

Six rooms had ceiling-mounted projectors (three different brands, three different aspect ratios) connected to laptops via HDMI or VGA cables. Four rooms had large-format Samsung commercial displays purchased locally. Three rooms had older Polycom SoundStation conference phones that had been configured for the company's previous legacy video conferencing platform, which had since been migrated to Microsoft Teams — leaving the Polycom units functional as audio-only speakerphones but incapable of initiating Teams video calls. Seven rooms had no video conferencing capability at all, requiring participants to join Teams meetings on personal laptops and attempt to share audio through laptop speakers — a solution that produced poor audio quality and echo.

The 9-minute average meeting start time was measured by the company's facilities team over a two-week observation period. The measurement covered the time from the scheduled meeting start to the moment the first presentation slide was visible or the first video call was connected. The 9-minute average masked significant variance: rooms with projectors required the most setup time (finding the remote, waiting for warm-up, adjusting aspect ratio), while Teams meetings were frequently delayed by participants troubleshooting connection issues at their individual laptops.

Video conference failures were an acute embarrassment. Three documented incidents in the quarter preceding the project involved video conference connections failing during active client meetings — in one case, a global category director was presenting to a key retail partner when the Teams call dropped and could not be reconnected for 12 minutes, during which the meeting was suspended. The global IT team had flagged the Dhaka office as a "high-incident AV location" in the global IT operations dashboard.

A global facilities audit conducted in early 2026 assessed the Dhaka regional headquarters' AV infrastructure against the company's global meeting room standard — which required uniform one-touch meeting start capability for all rooms above a minimum size threshold, Microsoft Teams Rooms certification for three specific boardroom sizes, and acoustic compliance for rooms used for video conferencing. The Dhaka office received an "unsatisfactory" assessment for AV infrastructure — the only regional office to receive this rating. The global IT Director issued a directive to the Bangladesh Country IT Head requiring the office to achieve a satisfactory AV assessment within 12 months.

SSAL designed and installed a standardized AV system across all 20 meeting rooms, differentiated by room category: small rooms (6 rooms, under 8 persons), medium rooms (11 rooms, 8-16 persons), and large boardrooms (3 rooms, 16-30 persons).

All Rooms — Crestron Mercury X Room Control (MX-70): Every meeting room received a Crestron Mercury X (MX-70) collaborative conferencing system mounted at the table. The Mercury X is a single-device solution that combines room scheduling display, USB audio/video hub for laptop connection, AEC (Acoustic Echo Cancellation) speakerphone, and Bluetooth for wireless device connection. The key innovation is one-touch start: a staff member enters the room, taps the Crestron room scheduling panel on the wall (a Crestron TSS-770 room touch screen showing the calendar booking for the room), the displays power on, the Mercury X activates, and the laptop connects automatically via USB — the entire process takes under 60 seconds with no configuration steps. Room scheduling integration with Microsoft Exchange/Outlook ensures the room display shows the current and upcoming meetings.

All Rooms — Professional Displays: 20x LG 65" and 86" commercial displays (LG UM5N-E series) were installed in rooms according to size — 65" in small rooms, 86" in medium rooms. Large boardrooms received dual 86" displays for multi-source presentation. All displays are commercial-grade (16/7 rated operation), wall-mounted at optimised viewing height, and connected to the Crestron DM NVX AVoIP network. All projectors in the six rooms that previously had them were removed.

Large Boardrooms — Microsoft Teams Rooms Certified Configuration: The three boardrooms received a full Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) certified system: a dedicated Teams Rooms compute module (Lenovo ThinkSmart Core), Crestron FS-T70 touch controller for Teams interface, dual 86" displays (one for content, one for video participant gallery), and integrated camera (Logitech Rally Bar for wide-angle PTZ coverage). The MTR configuration means boardroom video conferences start with a single tap on the Teams Rooms touch screen — no laptop required, no account sign-in, no driver installation. The room itself has a persistent Microsoft Teams Room identity, and invitations can be sent directly to the room from Outlook.

Large Boardrooms — Shure MXA920 Ceiling Microphones: Each of the three boardrooms received one Shure MXA920 ceiling array microphone installed above the conference table. The MXA920 uses steerable beamforming to dynamically track and focus on active speakers around the table, suppressing reflections from the boardrooms' glass walls and ambient noise from the office HVAC. Up to 8 simultaneous beams can be active, capturing multi-speaker discussions without any dead spots. The MXA920 connects to a Shure IntelliMix P300 audio conferencing processor (DSP), which handles echo cancellation, noise suppression, and level normalisation before the audio is sent to the Teams Rooms system.

All Rooms — JBL Professional Ceiling Speakers: Professional JBL Control 26CT ceiling speakers (2 per room) provide high-quality audio output for meeting room sound, video conference audio, and presentation audio. The JBL speakers are connected to Crown amplifiers sized by room, providing significantly better audio fidelity than the laptop or TV speakers they replace.

Crestron DM NVX AVoIP Distribution: The Crestron DM NVX platform enables any AV source on the office network to be routed to any display in any room via the existing 10GbE data network. Each display in each room has a DM NVX decoder; each source point has a DM NVX encoder. The routing is controlled via the Crestron Mercury X console in each room or from the central Crestron control server for global programming changes. This architecture eliminates discrete per-room HDMI cabling runs and enables future flexibility — a room's display source can be changed, or a signal split to multiple rooms, via software configuration rather than physical cable changes.

Room Scheduling Panels: All 20 rooms received Crestron TSS-770 7" wall-mount scheduling panels installed adjacent to the room entrance, showing current and upcoming booking status, allowing ad-hoc bookings, and confirming room check-in for booked meetings. Panels are integrated with Microsoft Exchange for real-time calendar synchronisation.