Security Control Room Productivity: Furniture Makes a Difference

For security professionals around the world, the control room is arguably the most important tool needed to successfully complete the job. A well-built control room is an extension of the operator, providing optimal support through purposeful design and advanced technology.

Comfort, durability, ergonomics, technical features — these are all important considerations that need to be assessed when selecting security control room furniture. Engineering an effective control room takes know-how and support.

Office Furniture Versus Technical Furniture

When building a control room, it’s important to understand the difference between technical furniture and run-of-the-mill office furniture.
Quality, durability, cable management, easy access, and ergonomics are key differentiators between average office desks and technical furniture.

Quality and Durability: Typical office furniture is used 2,080 hours a year, where control room furniture is used 8,760 hours a year.

Technical furniture is built for durability and is typically found in intensive, operational environments, such as emergency dispatch centers and control rooms, which utilize the workstations 24/7, 365 days a year. This type of furniture must be up to the task; the quality of its surfaces, hardware components and accessories must perform at a level that exceeds the expectations of a typical desks.
When regular office furniture is exposed to atypical use, such as in 24/7 operations, you can expect premature wear and tear, resulting in additional costs.

Cable Management: Traditional office furniture typically only has keyboards, a mouse and monitor cables to house and manage. On the other hand, a continuous workspace has very large cable challenges.
Technical furniture is best suited for housing and managing large quantities of computer, audiovisual, communications or medical equipment and the associated peripherals. Unlike traditional office furniture, technical furniture is equipped with advanced cable management systems. This helps reduce clutter in your control room and makes it easier to access and move equipment.
Easy Access: With so much technology and peripherals being packaged into technical furniture it’s imperative that there is easy access to cables, plugs, CPU’s, monitors that are essential to running the business. This is often over- looked and without easy access valuable time can be lost trying to add new piece of technology.
Ergonomics: The most significant difference between office furniture and technical furniture is ergonomics. Traditional office furniture is designed to support users during a typical eight-hour workday. Technical furniture, on the other hand, is built specifically for 24/7 environments and is engineered to support operators in industries where focus and productivity are critical. Proper ergonomics leads to superior situational awareness, allowing operators to keep their mind in the game.

Finding the Right Console

When building or updating a security control room, you must assess room size, number of operators and technical needs (e.g., monitors, table space, etc.). You can start this assessment and your design process by using tools such as Winsted’s free WELS software. WELS is a user-friendly program that lets control room managers quickly design a solution that meets their needs.
Winsted’s new Vue Workstation is easily configurable for all environments and comes in static or height-adjustable options. These configurable workstations offer different widths and connecting cabinets for multi-operator solutions.
The Sightline Console is the ultimate in configurable and modular design and is offered in static or height-adjustable versions, as well as two different console depths. These configurable consoles come with concave and convex corners to create solutions that fit any room size.
Both the Vue Workstation and Sightline Console offer multiple work surface options, cable management, and open or closed design.

For more information about technical consoles, visit Winsted.com