TEAMWORK HELPS NIKE UPGRADE SECURITY AT WORLD HEADQUARTERS

Few would argue the respect that Nike garners as a corporation in the world, and the Nike Swoosh is one of the most recognized brands anywhere. The company’s focus on innovational excellence extends into everything related to the Nike brand, including the corporate headquarters. Nike’s World Headquarters (WHQ) near Beaverton, Ore. is a beautiful corporate campus designed as a true monument to sports and the great athletes who bring the fan out in all of us. The 193-acre campus is home to nearly 5,000 employees, includes a sevenacre lake, running trails, playing fields and 17 main buildings whose names pay tribute to some of Nike’s most legendary athletes and coaches. The sprawling grounds and all of the buildings on campus are monitored around the clock and secured after business hours and weekends to ensure the safety of staff, the security of trade secrets and the privacy of high-profile celebrities who visit the campus.

Donna Olson, Nike WHQ security manager, and her team oversee security operations for the company, monitoring 50 buildings nationwide, including WHQ, from the security control room on campus. As Nike has grown in recent years, so too has the need for additional monitoring capabilities. Given Nike’s focus on design, when the time came to upgrade the control room, aesthetics played a significant role in the design process. Nike worked with longtime vendor Aronson Security Group (ASG), Seattle, an independent integrator of enterprise security solutions, on the control room upgrade. "If you ever stepped foot on the Nike campus you would find it’s the nicest, most welcoming corporate campus in North America," said Mike Kobelin, vice president of sales for ASG. "But the security console and their operations center was outdated."

According to Nike’s Olson, the previous control room was set up for one security officer with a small rack-mount console. However, as her security staff got busier and busier it became clear they needed to add a second officer in the control room but simply didn’t have the space. Together, Olson and Kobelin set out to change that, spending two years traveling to various trade shows and visiting control rooms at other corporations researching options for a new security console and video wall.

Nike partnered with ASG to create an efficient way for Olson and her team to monitor security systems for WHQ and the company’s manufacturing and office locations all over the country, including those for Cole Haan and Converse, two of Nike’s affiliate companies. Designs for the new control room were focused on making it possible for two officers to comfortably work at the console and do the same functions, with space for a third officer in the event of a larger crisis. Plans for the upgrade also included a new video wall.

Nike and ASG wanted to work with the technical furniture experts at Winsted Corporation to design the new console. Steve Runkle, who managed the Nike account for ASG, worked closely with Winsted designers to hammer out the details for the new console. Dave Tewel, western regional sales manager for Winsted, made numerous visits to Nike headquarters over the duration of the project - doing everything from outlining what Winsted had to offer to taking measurements of the room and creating preliminary designs. Winsted also provided three-dimensional mockups of the designs that really helped provide a clear picture of what the final console design would look like.

The two main workstations also face a new standalone video wall, with four 42-inch displays, that was custom built for the control room. Winsted’s console also incorporates numerous design considerations to make power and cable/wire management easy and efficient. A large dual-cable raceway hidden inside of the console separates signal and power cords. Data and power ports built in to the back of the console work surface combined with raised flooring in the control room keeps all cables and cords hidden from view.

According to Runkle, the changeover from the old system to the new could not have gone more smoothly. Nike has several other security bunkers that were able to take over monitoring for the bit of time it took to gut the control room, right down to the raised flooring and walls, and install the new console and video wall. The new Winsted console was shipped to Nike in a modular fashion and the installers from ASG found it to be very straightforward to set up - even with very little practice setting up consoles. "The operators are happy. They realize it is a state-of-the-art control room," said Olson. "It’s very clean, very sharp, very cool."

When asked why Nike and ASG chose a Winsted console, Kobelin said, "I think it was positively that Winsted was able to help us design a solution that fit ergonomically and looked good. Because having something that looks modern, is functional, and is state-of-the-art is really important to Nike." "They want to have people look inside that security room and say, ‘Wow!’" Kobelin adds. "Not only that, but the upgrade has increased efficiency and the value of Nike’s security operations because everything works so much more smoothly." After a significant amount of research and some insightful guidance from a few trusted vendors, the newly redesigned security control room at Nike WHQ is now a true reflection of the Nike brand - as impressive to look at as the stunning campus it monitors.