Caterhire

Caterhire - Ireland’s leading Event & Party Hire company have provided a uniquely high quality service to the Hospitality and Event industry for over 30 years. What you see is what you get from Caterhire – Quality, Service, Reliability, Innovation, and an experience customers and guests will never forget!

Their Company values are driven by providing a first class service to their customers and leading the events market with product innovation. Caterhire offers the most extensive range of quality brands for hire in the market. Brands that will create an impact and transform any event from the ordinary to the sublime.

As their event hire business came to a standstill in late March, Caterhire continued with a small skeleton crew and supplied rental products mainly to the healthcare industry. This started with catering and refrigeration hire and seating for social distancing.

Caterhire has a range of Hand Sanitiser Stations and Crowd Control Systems for sale. Their warehouse and delivery team are following the government guidelines of social distancing, hand washing and wearing correct PPE. Caterhire are there to help your business re-open, protecting your staff and your customers.

For more information, visit their website here.

Brennan and Company - Medical Supplies

Covid 19 presented a challenge for all businesses and Brennan and Company were no different. 70% of their business is with the HSE and the company were focused on two main areas. Keeping the supply chain intact, to ensure vital services received the products and support they needed to fight this virus, and secondly the health and welfare of their employees. Their staff have always been focused on providing a very high quality service to their customers and COVID - 19 saw the company rally as a team to ensure they played their part and supported those on the front line through the continued provision of vital equipment.

From an employee perspective Brennan and Company quickly mobilized to have as many people work from home as possible and their warehouse became a protected zone to ensure that they did not have to down tools and could keep business running as normal. All employees were given a Covid kit which contained an oximeter, to measure blood oxygen levels which can be an indicator of the presence of COVID-19, a set of masks and high grade hand sanitizer. Any staff who were considered essential and were visiting hospitals and other facilities, were provided with the highest grade PPE equipment. The company are fortunate to employ a full time housekeeper at their office in Sandyford and this allowed for twice daily deep cleaning of the office. Mental health is as important as physical health and they assisted their teams by providing regular communication and advice on COVID-19 prevention and on their plans to manage the crisis. Each member of staff received an appreciation basket of goodies from Gifts Galore for their hard work and dedication throughout the crisis. Brennan and Company also hosted an online table quiz and have started a virtual book club for their staff.

It’s important that we all stay connected even if we can’t meet in the usual way. These initiatives have helped the company to remain a strong team, focused on their
suppliers and their customers. They have a comprehensive return to work protocol and have installed contactless temperature testing for all employees and visitors before they enter the building each day. While COVID-19 has been challenging, it has shown the company that they have a dedicated team of employees who work tirelessly to ensure that their suppliers and customers continue to receive the same high quality service they have come to expect over the past 50 years.

CT Ireland

How CT Ireland has pivoted during the Coronavirus Pandemic

CT Ireland is a specialist audio-visual company located in Sandyford, Dublin. The company provides a range of services and systems to the audio-visual industry in Ireland. These include Live Event & Conference technical production (such as the big screens, audio & lighting systems, technical production staff, etc), Creative Content production, AV & Broadcast Systems Design & Installation, and a range of Managed Technical services, including field technicians, on-campus technical services, and engineering management and delivery. The company employs over 70 people in Dublin, and is part of the worldwide Creative Technology Group, with operations in Europe, Middle East, Asia-Pacific, and the USA.

The current crisis has led to a major impact on the Live Events business, with gatherings of people having come to a full stop almost overnight. This has, of course, led to the cancellation of virtually all conferences, concerts, exhibitions, and public events where traditionally, CT’s core Live business operates. The company’s Systems Integration business, whilst not quite as severely impacted, has had to pause operations on virtually all sites (with the exception of some sites deemed Essential Services). So to keep the business operating, CT have had to drastically pivot to deliver events and services in a completely new way. The challenge is to provide a way for clients to communicate with their audience remotely, and still maintain the high production values and look & feel of a traditional conference, but without the audience being present. Of course video conferencing has become the instant go-to solution for many of the communications needs of organisations, both for internal staff meetings, and external communications, but VC systems (and CT are one of the leading providers of systems in Ireland) are not really designed to deliver the big-impact delivery of a live auditorium event.

So the team at CT set about devising a system to replicate as closely as possible the live event experience, using remote technology, with the ability to respect social distancing rules.

Kevin Moore, Sales Director at CT, said: “Our technical team built a complete Virtual Event Space on site at the RDS in Ballsbridge, with a fully equipped TV studio built to the highest broadcast standards. One of the advantages that we have over many of our competitors in the Live Events space is that, as one of the leading system integrators for Broadcast TV systems, with clients such as RTE, Virgin Media, and TG4, the company’s engineers know how to build broadcast standard studio facilities. Indeed, the recent studio upgrades to RTE’s News Studio and Studio 5- which is currently being used for Prime Time- were completed by the broadcast engineering team at CT. We’ve been doing this for over 50 years, so we know our way around these facilities!”

So the facility that the team built at the RDS has been designed with this experience, with picture and sound quality up to the highest standards. If you are going to engage an audience, especially a remote audience, it’s vital that the technical delivery is as close as possible to the standards they are used to seeing on platforms such as live television, or online streaming services. To enable audience participation, a video conference system has been integrated into the system, using the StarLeaf platform, which provides high-quality, totally secure video-conferencing participation from the audience. The system also provides a streaming output to enable viewers worldwide.

With four broadcast-grade cameras, a large high-quality LED backdrop, and multi-channel wireless microphone facilities, the production values emulate the type of quality that major clients expect from an event, and have already been used successfully by a number of the company’s clients, for a range of activities including music performances, corporate team-building quiz nights, and even nation-wide audience participation competitions.

However, outside of the virtual event space, the company has managed to continue with some other projects, such as providing the LED backdrop for the recent Ireland On Call TV programme series on RTE, whilst the installation team have continued providing installation services for critical healthcare facilities, and the maintenance team have continued to provide support to organisations such as RTE, Virgin Media, and others.

It’s hard to see the situation for Live Events reverting to normal anytime soon, so the company continues to look at new, innovative ways to help it’s clients to deliver their message, and the team believe a blended approach is the future.

Jim Colgan, the Creative Producer at CT, said: “One area that we’re seeing huge interest in is the production of short videos for companies to educate their staff in back to work protocols. Our Creative Services team can create custom videos, to the highest standards, so that companies can induct their staff in the new on-premise procedures in place as the country slowly starts to open up”.

Tony Lanigan, the Technical Director for the Live team, says: “we think that there will be a need for corporations to keep the communications channels open with both their clients, and their staff. One impact of remote and home working is that it’s hard to maintain morale, and build those relationships between staff. So virtual events are likely to feature as a key part of the toolkit for clients who want to maintain the culture and spirit of their organization. No doubt this will evolve, and we see a likely demand for a range of facilities, from very small events, up to more significant global virtual conferences. But in the same way as live events have developed and become more professional over the years, we think that organizations will want to maintain the same level of quality, albeit remotely. So we think the role of our technical team is to match the quality of the virtual event as closely as possible to the live experience, and this, we think, is one of our key advantages. And having developed our inventory of kit over the past few years in our Sandyford warehouse, we have the toolkit to make sure we can deliver!”