N.J.-Based Buffalo Wild Wings Completes Four-Week Tech Overhaul in Two Weeks
Once a business has installed complete control and audio/video solutions in seven nearly identical restaurants, it can start to seem like a cookie-cutter operation. For Union City, N.J.-based Serious Audio Video, however, the eighth ELAN control installation in a Buffalo Wild Wings location was anything but standard.
Due to the company’s corporate mandate to redesign and upgrade each restaurant every seven years, the high-revenue North Brunswick, N.J. location was scheduled to be overhauled in 2017. As any business owner knows, you don’t want to interrupt a profitable operation, which meant that closing the location for four or five weeks was out of the question. According to Serious Audio Video, the time constraints made this an extremely high-stress job that required going way above and beyond the normal working call of duty.
To complete the job on-time, it required that Serious Audio Video have three shifts of three-worker crews, working 24 hours a day. Although the business isn’t prohibitively far from its office, the company had nine employees staying in a hotel down the road because it only had two weeks to do four or five weeks’ worth of work. Additionally, Serious Audio Video had to contend with all the different contractors working on top of each other - carpenters, electricians, flooring installers, and painters as the building was stripped down to the studs and everything was replaced.
Such a rapidly moving and crowded construction site meant a lot of pre-planning was required, so Serious Audio Vedio worked for weeks ahead of time to ensure that every component was in hand, every drawing and design was correct, and every employee knew their role and responsibilities. And in this case, it was a major benefit that the team had installed several very similar ELAN systems for other Buffalo Wild Wings locations.
Due to the new floorplan and interior design, the team had to relocate dozens of speakers and TVs as well as add 33 new Aquos display panels, mostly split between 60” and 80” models, plus four massive 90” models. Integrators know that uninstalling and reinstalling equipment is basically double the work. Six new Crown amplifiers replaced the existing equipment, and a Knoll projector paired with a 110” Dragonfly screen capped off the audio/video portion of the upgrade. For the control side, Serious Audio Video added a new ELAN gSC10 system controller, a S1616A Multi-Room Audio Controller, Xantech IR equipment, a Dell PC, an Apple iPort mount for an iPad with the ELAN app, and a 17” Planar touchscreen that provides an interface in the equipment rack.