Elgin Community College

Like many community colleges, Elgin's campus had grown system by system — a rack added here, a portable PA there, a control room rebuilt by a different vendor a few years later — until five buildings were running on five different, incompatible platforms with no shared spare parts, documentation, or support path.

The goal of the program was to set a single, campus-wide equipment standard: matching control processors, signal routing, touch-panel interfaces, and supporting infrastructure across rooms in five buildings. Rather than chasing the newest gear in each space, the design standardized on a coherent platform that added functionality, modernized the aging infrastructure, and gave the technology staff one set of parts to stock and one workflow to support.

The performance hall, athletics, culinary demonstration, dining, and event spaces each kept their purpose-built functionality, but now sit on the same backbone — so a rack built for one room can serve another, a failed amplifier is a same-day swap instead of a procurement project, and operators moving between buildings find the same interface every time they touch a panel.