Situation

One of Canada’s communications giants was about to completely relocate its corporate headquarters.  In the process, they intended to create a leading-edge communications, information technology, and call centre facility.  After a thorough presentation and evaluation process, AVW-TELAV was awarded an end-to-end consult, design, & build contract.  

The SNOC (Super National Operations Centre) was actually at one time three separate Network Operations Centres dispersed around the city. This move allowed the three adjacent operations totalling almost 70 workstations to be combined for the first time.

Solution

In undertaking the Needs Analysis phase of the project, AVW-TELAV’s design team worked with the customer to fine tune the original design concept. Three “war rooms” were reduced to two, and a separating partition then allowed each to be transformed into one large war room if required. Glass walls for each room allow viewing directly into the NOC, offering an added benefit of a visitor viewing location, in turn drastically simplifying security arrangements. 

Room layout was customized towards a tiered seating arrangement of continuous rows of radiating desks to optimize views and sight lines to the video display walls. Standard ‘off-the-shelf’ NOC desks could not be customized to meet this requirement, so purpose-built desks were designed to meet the geometric, ergonomic, and technical criteria of the operations centre, providing both a functionally-superior and more cost effective solution.

From a display standpoint, AVW-TELAV proposed three independent 2’x8’ display walls (one per business unit) comprised of 67” custom-built rear projection cube displays. Two 65” flat-panel TVs were then incorporated in-between each display wall to allow for general news and weather.  A multi-image control processor created a single ultra-high resolution desktop, allowing operators to manipulate the number of images displayed and the size and layout of these images quickly and easily as critical events unfold.

To ensure this design met the visions of the senior executive, a one-minute 3D fly-through simulation was created by AVW-TELAV’s team, giving the executive’s the final confidence to proceed.