Synaptics Human Interface Hardware
Achievements
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1000+ recordings shared
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40% employees involved
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7,000 hours saved annually
The Challenge
Based in San Jose, California, Synaptics is the pioneer and leader of the human interface revolution, bringing innovative and intuitive user experiences to intelligent devices. Synaptics’ broad portfolio of touch, display, biometrics, IoT, voice, audio, and multimedia products is built on the company’s rich R&D, extensive IP and dependable supply chain capabilities.
For Synaptics, the advanced technical sophistication of its offerings created a straightforward challenge. Clear documentation of the company’s cutting-edge knowledge base was essential to ensure that every employee could understand, support, and improve upon the company’s products. At a practical level, however, such documentation was a challenge to keep up with. As product lines and market positions changed rapidly, often the most current details or most critical elements would be known only in the minds of the company’s subject-matter experts.
Compounding issues, Synaptics as a company is organized into three distinct business units, each with its own internal structure. Members of any one team may not often interact with those of another. And if that weren’t enough, across each of those teams, more than half of Synaptics 2,300 employees are based in Asia, speaking English as their second language.
With no formal means of sharing knowledge internally, these structural, geographic, and language barriers sometimes made it difficult for an individual employee’s expertise to be shared effectively with everyone else inside the company.
“When you’re seeking out a specific detail on a complex subject, it’s almost impossible to tell beforehand if a video will still be relevant, or if it will even have the exact information you need,” remarked one Synaptics employee. “I need specific information at a specific moment. I don’t have time to watch
an hour-long video or dig through multiple documents to get what I need.”
The Solution
Recognizing these challenges, Minette Chan, Director of Learning Solutions at Synaptics, and the Learning Solutions department at Synaptics set an audacious goal. Not only did they want to make formal and informal knowledge sharing more centrally accessible – they wanted to affect a change in Synaptics’ culture.
With Panopto, Synaptics created its own internal video portal. Dubbed “SynaVision”, the platform made it easy for the Synaptics team to view, share, and also contribute videos to a secure and centralized library. With SynaVision, employees could use Panopto to record virtually any activity where knowledge was shared – detailed walkthroughs delivered by subject-matter experts, project kickoff and update meetings, procedural overviews, and more – anywhere, anytime, and using the webcams on the laptops and mobile devices they already had.
The technical aspects of video production and management were taken care of instantly, without the added time and cost of working with third party AV specialists. Through Panopto, every video file uploaded to SynaVision – whether new or old – would be automatically converted for optimal playback on any device, indexed for search, and made shareable so that other employees could watch on-demand. Teams and individuals just clicked “record,” presented the information they wanted to share, and let Panopto take care of the rest.
“SynaVision has helped us make information available sooner by reducing the time to publish,” said Ms. Chan. “What used to take two to four weeks now takes less than one business day. Using Panopto has made information sharing much more efficient and streamlined within our organization.”
For viewers, meanwhile, SynaVision could provide an active learning experience. Panopto’s in-video quizzing feature enabled video creators to include questions to reinforce key points in their videos. And Panopto’s variable-speed playback enabled viewers to speed up or slow down the video as it played – from half-speed to double-speed – a great assist to non-native language speakers.
The Impact
With SynaVision in place, Synaptics had established a complete, video-enabled solution for sharing expertise – one that would transcend team structures, language barriers, and geographic challenges, and give the company unprecedented access to its institutional knowledge.
With SynaVision, Synaptics has amplified global employee knowledge sharing, providing a valued solution to the company’s challenge of making expertise accessible.
Shortly after the launch of the platform, more than 40% of company employees had visited SynaVision, watching thousands of hours of material.
Within just a few months, more than 1,000 videos could be found on SynaVision, and Synaptics employees from around the globe come to the site daily to seek out and consume information essential to their work.
The Learning Solutions department estimates that in any given week, SynaVision will save roughly a quarter of Synaptics employees approximately 15 minutes they’d otherwise spend searching for information. That modest individual gain translates to nearly 7,000 productive hours saved by the company annually, not to mention the increase in information sharing facilitated through SynaVision.
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