With 4000 employees across 50 locations in 30 countries, how do you keep everyone informed, motivated and feeling like part of the team? For Marel, the answer is professional video communication.

Marel is the leading global provider of advanced equipment for the food processing industries, providing machinery that does everything from harvesting raw materials to packaging the final product. Headquartered in Iceland, it has offices and subsidiaries in 30 countries, including four demo centres in Copenhagen (Denmark), Boxmeer (Netherlands), Des Moines and Lenexa, (USA).

With rapid changes in technology and regular updates to the product line, Marel needed a better way to share important information with its staff around the world. They decided to produce a monthly video broadcast called Marel Live.

“Previously we used conventional communications such as emails and phone calls, but they weren’t efficient or effective,” says Ingolfur Orn Gudmundsson, Corporate Director of Marketing, Marel. “We wanted a better way, so our teams would see first hand what was going on from the product centres and hear from the product development people. Video brings things to life, it allows the sales people to understand the technology and how it works, and enables them to transfer this knowledge directly to the customer, which in turn helps us increase our sales.”

The Marel marketing team researched video production tools and found NewTek’s TriCaster multi-camera production system. “We wanted to have control over the production, time to air and our overall brand, so bringing things in-house made sense for us. We also needed to consider maintenance costs, purchase costs, and it had to be easy to operate,” says Ingolfur. “TriCaster addresses all these points.”

Haraldur Gunnlaugsson, the host of Marel Live, concurs. “We wanted to do this properly and invest in good equipment that would do the job for us. With TriCaster we have the ability to produce and live stream high quality, multi-camera video and audio programming, in a very short time, on a very small budget.”

The Copenhagen demo centre is one of the many locations Marel broadcast from on a regular basis. The set-up features four cameras, a green screen, lights, monitors and microphones as well as the TriCaster – yet everything fits into a single flight case that can be easily transported to different offices to record meetings or presentations for later broadcast. “To be able to set up a complete TV station in half an hour is pretty good!” says Oskar Sveinsson, Producer of Marel Live. “In particular, the green screen functionally is unbelievable - we are able to do live green screen recordings and easily add in a suitable background with no post production required, it saves so much time.”

Once a month, the production team records presentations, using PowerPoint and product demonstrations, and vision-mixes them live with presenter links and interviews with product specialists. Employees then take part in a live Q&A with the presenter to find out more about what they have just seen. The Marel Live shows are live-streamed twice in a day to accommodate different time zones.

In addition to these regular monthly shows, the biannual company meetings are also broadcast around the organisation; and if there is a new product or development that is too important to wait for the next show, the team has the equipment available to produce an extra programme quickly and at no additional cost.

“By live broadcasting our videos and presentations we are creating an open dialogue with our sales people around the world,” says Haraldur. “Everyone gathers in their meeting rooms at each location and receives the same message, keeping them up to date with the company’s developments and enabling live discussion. We have had great feedback from our viewers, it’s an ideal medium to get these important messages through.”

He also believes that using video in this way gives the company a competitive edge. “We have more educated people out in the field, they know more about what we do and are more aware of the solutions across our whole portfolio,” he says. “The investment in professional multi-camera video technology has been really good for us - it has shown us that connecting with people is really important to make everyone feel more involved.”

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