Project Spotlight: Clean Harbors


Dear Readers,

Welcome to Spring! This month we feature a client who ensures those beautiful tulips keep coming up year after year. Clean Harbors is committed to providing  their  customers  with the highest quality environmental services and to preserving our natural environment. An important element to making this happen is consistent, regular, high quality training for employees. Clean Harbors called us to help them create that state-of-the-art training experience. The article below highlights the features and capability of this very busy training facility.

Enjoy the better weather.

Catherine
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Daily Training Sessions Require State of the Art Presentation Capabilities

For Clean Harbors, Flexibility is Key

Founded in 1980, Clean Harbors has grown to become North America's leading provider of environmental, energy and industrial services. The company provides a broad range of hazardous material management and disposal services including the collection, packaging, recycling, treatment, and disposal of hazardous and non-hazardous waste. Because of the nature of the items Clean Harbors deals with on a daily basis, they need to ensure every employee is well trained on regulatory laws, hazardous material handling, and general safety topics meant to protect employees, the environment, and the general public.

 "Our number one goal, our motto, is 'Safety First,'" said Herve Bailey, Vice President of Information Technology.  "From the simple things like paying attention when climbing out of a truck to the critical items such as properly labeling, packing and shipping hazardous waste, Clean Harbors employees keep safety top of mind. And because safety is a big part of our culture, safety training occurs every single day."

"We began this project knowing that our training facilities needed to be improved," Herve continued. "We have thousands of people all over the country that need to receive the same training, so we knew we needed a solution to accommodate that but we had no idea how to accomplish our vision."

cleanharbors

With general ideas in mind but no final plan, Clean Harbors reached out to several sound and video integration companies to help formalize their ideas. "We asked everyone to meet with us and to provide a bid," said Herve. "But when we met with Shanahan it was clear they got it. They understood what we wanted to accomplish, they asked intelligent, probing questions, and they brought tremendous knowledge and experience to the table."

The work began in a large conference room in Clean Harbors' corporate location in Norwell, MA. But as the requirements evolved it became clear that this facility would not provide the flexibility required to effectively handle small training sessions, large conferences, multi-day meetings and more.

"Once we began working with Shanahan we realized that if we were going to make the investment in a state-of-the art training facility we needed to do it right," explained Herve. Next door to the corporate office, Clean Harbors had a building that they planned to use to support their business expansion. After touring the building, Shanahan was able to work closely with the architects to provide expertise on how the room needed to be constructed to deliver all of Clean Harbors' goals. The result was a training complex with an amphitheater-style room bordered by four smaller conference/training/meeting rooms.    
 

CleanHarbors Room & System Features

  • Rear projection screen
  • Two drop down projection screens
  • Moveable podium with
    • Fixed mic
    • Lavaliere mic
    • Projection screen controls
    • Capability to plug in a computer or a USB drive
    • Ability to use information from the corporate network
    • Controls for dual screen or single screen
  • Audio conference capability that allows everyone in the room to hear questions from remote participants
  • Annotation capabilities allowing presenters to annotate over their presentation   


The Results: Multi-Functional, Highly Flexible Training Environment

By raising a corner of the ceiling to 16 feet, Clean Harbors was able to create a room that with, tiered stadium-like seating holds 80+ people all focused on the front of the room, where trainers and presenters have incredible flexibility they can leverage with the touch of a button. At the front of the room is a large 144" x 90" rear projection screen that supports multiple types of single screen presentations.  Often training is more like a working session and the presenter needs the ability to simultaneously display a presentation and something else. To accommodate this, Shanahan installed two projection screens that drop out of the ceiling at the push of a button so the presenter can demonstrate, for example,  what happens in different scenarios. On one screen they may present a 'what if' scenario and on the right hand screen the participants can immediately see the results. "The two screen approach mimics how Clean Harbors works," said Shaun Crossen, Shanahan Systems Consultant. "Most people in the company have two monitors on their desk that allow them to be more efficient and to multi-task. Having the two screens allows a trainer to mimic how employees work every day and this makes the training much more efficient."

In addition to flexible projection capabilities, Clean Harbors wanted to make sure that the room worked for any style presenter. They did not know if a speaker would want to work from the left or the right of the auditorium; if they would need to be mic'd or not mic'd;  if they preferred a podium or to walk around; if they would bring their laptop or just the presentation. In addition some individuals participate in the training from a remote location using WebEx. Clean Harbors did not want to limit the presenter in any way and wanted to make sure that all participants would have the same experience whether they were onsite or online. "Each time we sat down to talk about all the ways we would use this room, we kept giving Shanahan problems and they kept coming back with answers," said Herve. "It was a great collaboration and Shanahan's consulting work was as important as the quality of equipment and onsite service. I can truly say we received great value for our investment and the proof is in the final product. We have used the rooms a number of times and it does everything we want simply and efficiently. In fact, we used to have to go to Babson College for our Executive and Senior leadership meetings, but now we can use our own facilities."   _________________________________________________________________________

Let us help you turn your audio and visual requirements into reality. Give us a call at 800-786-1556 or contact us today. One of our professionals will be happy to work with you.   
 
 
Catherine Shanahan, President