Fives Makes Collaboration Easy with BlueJeans Gateway

One of the strengths that sets leading industrial engineering group Fives apart from its rivals is agility. Drawing on a network of experts across over 100 subsidiaries in nearly 30 countries, it can rapidly respond to market changes and deliver innovative solutions that anticipate customers’ needs.

But for Fives to sustain that agility, its leaders and teams must be able to easily connect and collaborate. For Group Chief Information Officer Marc Sery, that means ensuring they have access to collaboration tools that are consistently reliable and easy to use.

However, when Marc sought to roll out Microsoft Teams as the Group’s main collaboration platform, he found he also needed a way to seamlessly merge Teams with existing room video conferencing and call systems. Deploying BlueJeans Gateway has allowed him to do just that, saving time and money while keeping the organization’s communication strategy on track.

Building Employee Connectivity

Fives designs and supplies machines, process equipment, and production lines for the world’s largest manufacturers. Its products and solutions span a wide range of industries, from steel, aerospace, special machining and aluminium to automotive, manufacturing, cement, energy, logistics, and glass.

In 2019, Marc and his IT team began looking at ways to standardize collaboration across the Group. They wanted to reduce reliance on different platforms that did not work well together and create a leaner, stronger technology stack.

“By uniting our subsidiaries’ communication approach and integrating email, file-sharing, and video meetings systems via a single platform, we hoped to make it easier for employees to share information and be productive,” Marc explains.

Marc decided to partner with Microsoft for Fives’ collaboration needs. As a first step to creating a one-stop collaboration approach, the team rolled out Microsoft Office 365 across the enterprise. As a second step, Marc decided to adopt Microsoft Teams as the Group standard collaborative and video conferencing platform. By unifying Fives’ systems in one cohesive, easy-to-manage deployment, he aimed to streamline internal collaboration for employees and reduce complexity.

By mid-2019, Marc’s team began creating an adoption plan to help migrate the Group’s employees to Teams. However, they soon realized they’d hit a roadblock that made this process far from straightforward.

“We had hundreds of meeting rooms equipped with top-of-the-line video conferencing equipment that we didn’t want to replace, but it wasn’t compatible with Teams’ hardware requirements,” explains Denise Wong, Digital Workplace Manager at Fives.

Ensuring Seamless Adoption of Microsoft Teams

Marc and his team discovered that BlueJeans’ solution for cloud video interoperability — BlueJeans Gateway for Microsoft Teams — would allow them to seamlessly connect Fives’ legacy standards-based room systems with Teams.

“That way, we could avoid having to replace equipment, saving the Group money as well as time,” says Denise.

At the same time, BlueJeans Gateway’s integration with Teams and Outlook would make joining meetings a seamless experience for the Group’s employees.

It was an easy decision for the team, which was already using a BlueJeans solution at its Fives Nordon entity in eastern France. By deploying Rooms as a Service (Raas) with Dolby Voice Room, Fives had been able to upgrade certain meeting rooms with best-in-class hardware and software.

“We already acknowledged BlueJeans’ reliability and performance, so Gateway was the first and only option we looked at,” says Denise.

Streamlining Cross-Team Collaboration

The IT team trialed BlueJeans Gateway at the Group’s Paris headquarters and the Fives Nordon site, a process involving about 1,200 employees.

“It was really simple to deploy and scale, so we had it up and running in just a couple of days,” says Denise.

Based on that success, the team rolled out Gateway across the Group. They could then quickly deploy and scale Microsoft Teams throughout the organization in line with the company’s original adoption plan.

By March 2020, the implementation was complete — just as the COVID-19 pandemic struck and many Fives employees across the world began shifting to remote work.

Now, as employees start to return to their offices, they can walk into any meeting room and join a Teams meeting with zero hassle, thanks to BlueJeans Gateway’s consistent one-touch join experience.

“When we decided to roll out Microsoft Teams across our organization, the last thing we wanted was to rip and replace our existing conference rooms’ systems,” says Marc. “With BlueJeans Gateway for Microsoft Teams, we’re not only optimizing the ROI on our existing hardware, but we’ve also been able to accelerate our Teams rollout so our people can book conference rooms and join Teams meetings with a single touch.”