MCP's Helps Manatee County, FL Replace Aging AV System

In Summary:

• Manatee County's audiovisual system that served the county’s public safety complex was experiencing significant issues concerning reliability, lack of flexibility and difficult-to-view screens.
• The county partnered with Mission Critical Partners to provide subject-matter expertise and to guide and support the procurement process.
• The new system is extremely flexible, even allowing users working remotely to access it, which has been an important benefit during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background

Manatee County is located along Florida’s Gulf Coast. It is bordered by the cities of Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg to the north, Hardee and DeSoto counties to the east, the city of Sarasota to the south, and the Gulf of Mexico to the west. 

Manatee's public safety center offers multiple conference rooms and work areas, in addition to the 911 center and an emergency operations center (EOC). The audiovisual (AV) technologies used by these divisions had begun to age and much of the equipment was nearing end of life. This created numerous issues for the department, including reliability concerns, limited system flexibility, and difficult-to-view screens. As a result, the department began to identify and then implement a new AV system that would perform better throughout the complex.

How MCP Helped

The MCP team helped the department outline its goals for the system and develop a request for proposals (RFP) document to help identify the right solution and provider.

“When we embarked on this project, we had no idea what we wanted in our new system,” said Jake Saur, Manatee County director of public safety. “MCP’s team helped us translate our wants into needs and identify the ideal solution to meet our goals. Then, they helped us evaluate the proposed solutions—identifying the pros and cons of each—to help us select the system and provider.”

The flexibility of Manatee's new AV system has helped the department to operate effectively
and efficiently throughout the pandemic, as some staff members continued to work remotely, and social-distancing guidelines remained in effect.

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