In the midst of the discussion about Green ideas and best business practices for AV, the industry often overlooks the basic steps we can take to promote environmental responsibility and to reduce waste while increasing productivity and information access.

Mary Meeker, President of Mary Meeker Design, Inc., a decade-old AV company that specializes in retail stores, began a new Green phase of her business by asking the question "what do best practices really mean."

To find the answer she examined the entire AV installation process from the "bigger picture, [taking] things back to the inception."  In so doing, Mary discovered that, even with all of the innovative options for products, integration and energy saving technology, an AV installation still culminates in the old school "book of paper" with information from various sources that goes uncultivated and often unread. As Mary notes, "Handing someone a book of paper is not Green... [especially when it] goes by the wayside"

Despite the fact that all projects have books, Mary observed that "nobody thinks about the documentation phase" when they think about the opportunity to make a project more Green.  But it is a key component to an overall Green profile.

Mary's solution brings the project book into the 21st century, increasing its usability and sharpening its Green profile, with Mary Meeker Design's Electronic Interactive Project (EIP).  The EIP leads to cleaner, more efficient sites and paves the way for remote access to troubleshoot and to save energy, money and time.  It creates a "well rounded, fully documented project" that allows access to specifications, manuals and more in a fully customizable interactive PDF format.

Remote access capability bolsters the Green business benefits of EIP.  It replaces the cumbersome book with information that can be stored and "stay on a server and accessed easily at any time." 

In this way, Meeker Design's EIP merges Green AV and Green IT with smart, clean tech solutions for common business practices.

Further, EIP meets construction demands and exceeds current approaches by moving beyond collecting manuals and certifications to "close out all documentation" and access it later to assess a project's success, plan for improvements and fix problems.

In developing a Green business solution to project documentation, Meeker notes that documentation can be a "Catch 22" in the eyes of the industry at large.

Integrators do not always want to surrender what they identify as their intellectual property to the EIP, although a complete EIP that covers the scope of the project can, according to Meeker, "empowers the customer to work with you more effectively” and underscores a strong customer-provider relationship.

Mary describes the EIP as going from the "start to end of a project," a certain cradle to cradle approach to documentation with benefits for designers, builders, owners and end users.

View a sample EIP from Meeker Design, Inc.