Spectacular Novelties to Serve Teamwork

András Leveli

The Hungarian-owned LSK Hungária Kft. began in 1994 as a distributor of multimedia, visual and technical devices. From the beginning of the 2000s, it extended its offer with interactive whiteboards. Today, thanks among other things to governmental projects financed with EU funds, it has implemented about 25,000 whiteboard systems in Hungarian schools, together with its retail partners.

From the beginning the company looked for value-adding opportunities, for example when it localized distributed products and provided training for them, and in 2010 it raised this trend to a new strategic level.

That was when András Leveli was tasked with building a portfolio that serves corporate needs with B4B solutions. The Budapest Business Journal asked the manager about his experiences and the further development steps.

BBJ: The prototype of your interactive visual-collaboration solution was finished by 2014 as a result of intense market research and multi-year development. Why did you focus on this area?

András Leveli: The various collaboration forms show a rich spectrum from fully informal brainstorming on a traditional whiteboard or flipchart through project meetings and on to formal presentations. Since these processes did not have “interactive technological” support, we decided to develop our own solution that improves the efficiency of the corporate collaboration through visual information sharing.

BBJ: Your solutions are used by SMEs and multinational companies here and internationally, beginning with the financial sector and moving through the production and construction industry to agriculture. What do your customers value?

AL: Maybe the one-of-a-kind style and the ecosystem. Every customer has his or her own needs; some are looking for video-conference systems, and others would like to replace the classical flipchart with something else within their digital transformation. The essence is to first survey what the customer really needs. Our modular solutions are adjusted flexibly to this; we always elaborate the exact structure together with the client, which means we are improving the solution together. Today this hardware-software-service package has become a complex ecosystem where every component is strongly interconnected. We supply and support our tailor-made solutions with factory-like quality and we always provide the best to our clients.

BBJ: Your developments keep pace with technological trends; your solutions have been integrated with the Microsoft Teams UC service and other collaboration cloud-platforms, and have been extended with BYOD support. Your newest development is a room booking system. Does this signal the next innovation wave?

AL: Our LSK SpaceTime room booking system is definitely the first example of “ecosystem thinking” that prevents the chaos that can derive from booking meeting rooms. By cooperating with the most commonly used corporate calendars, it clearly and visually displays pre-scheduled meetings near the meeting room door, while it also enables ad-hoc reservation. In the case of an extended meeting, it enables the reservation to be prolonged, or indeed, facilitates early termination if a meeting is over sooner than expected. In addition, it also indicates if there is a video-conference going on inside that should not be disturbed by opening the meeting room doors.

With our trade mark high flexibility, LSK SpaceTime is being adjusted to real life situations for which, by using the IoT-based technologies, we are developing remote management services with which IT operators can supervise the end-point devices remotely, even through smart phones.

Our hardware components are also improving. We try to develop solutions that provide a richer user experience and that can be handled more easily; for example, we enable direct note-taking into a classical PowerPoint presentation, a feature that was also developed based on user feedback.