By MIKE MASUCCI, The Belden Blog -- After complex cabling projects come to an end, there are always a few lessons to be learned. As we uncover them, we want to share these lessons with you. Here, we’re sharing a few tricks we learned about managing large cabling projects after working with Toyota. (This project is just one of many Toyota projects we’ve been involved with – and learned valuable lessons from.) As Toyota’s team expanded, the company brought employees from four different divisions together in one location to foster collaboration.
A 2.2 million-square-foot, billion-dollar corporate headquarters was built in Plano, TX, that spans seven buildings and houses 4,000+ employees. To support the kind of work being done on this campus – engineering, accounting, sales and marketing – millions of linear feet of cable were needed to create an infrastructure that fosters collaboration. The cabling system also needed to be able to support IoT convergence and Power over Ethernet (PoE) to connect devices like surveillance cameras and wireless access points to the network. WiFi stretches across the 100-acre campus; employees can connect whether they’re outside, in one of the 11 onsite restaurants or at the onsite pharmacy.
To manage a project of this size, here’s what we did:
1. Create a Plan for Success
Cabling projects of this magnitude require lots of planning and coordination. When Belden partnered with Toyota to provide cable and connectivity for its Plano campus, we decided to form Team Toyota. We assigned specific roles to Belden employees so Toyota would receive consistent, continuous support from several different departments, from logistics and customer service to technical and product support. Expectations were defined upfront so all team members knew what to anticipate in terms of communication.
A project calendar was also created so everyone knew exactly when certain things were happening – and who at Belden was managing each of those tasks. This gave Toyota peace of mind in knowing that, even if a Belden Team Toyota member was out sick or on vacation, an entire group of people was still available to answer questions and provide service.
