Dazzling Displays
Star Exhibits and Environments takes exhibit technologies beyond the booth.
BY JENNY SHERMAN
Walk through virtually any large trade show and you’ll notice that exhibits have moved far beyond the booth-and-brochure setups of years past. Today’s intricate environments sport LED lighting, digital graphics, and custom-built management software to track sales leads and product inventories. “These booths are becoming incredibly complex and detailed,” says Mark Johnson, CEO of Brooklyn Park-based Star Exhibits and Environments.
His company, which he cofounded in 1993, designs, creates, and manages trade show exhibits, events, and retail environments for clients such as Honeywell, Organic Valley, Payless Shoe Source, and Target. He describes one such football field-sized exhibit the company built for Whirlpool. The project featured eight separate kitchen environments and required up to 35 semiloads of materials to be shipped. “The project had thousands of tasks to be completed,” says Johnson, noting that, in the exhibit industry, “there is going to be more and more of that.”
Seeing the need for a technology platform that would answer the growing need for a way to manage the sophisticated design, construction, and follow-through of exhibits, Star developed Startranet, an interactive, Webbased Intranet/extranet portal that provides anyone involved in a project with access to all the information about how it is progressing. E-mails, assignments, files, reports, and contact information is available in real time on the password protected site.
“Startranet is a huge innovation—no one else in the industry has that,” says Johnson. “There are some out-of-thebox solutions out there, but they only provide about 60 or 70 percent solutions for clients.”
In addition, Startranet is customizable for particular client needs. One such client that benefited from the Startranet innovation is Pearson Assessments (NCS), a Bloomington testing and data collection firm that was opening more than 200 testing centers around the country. Star Exhibits was hired as project lead to design the centers, decide where to locate them, create and build them, and coordinate everything from building permits to leases, using different contractors and vendors from around the world.
“Originally, that’s what we created [Startranet] for,” says Johnson. “It allowed anybody in Pearson or within the project to see how much progress had been made.”
“We knew we needed a software device to centralize all the project tasks and files and information,” says John Paavola, a Star program manager who helped develop the Startranet system in a narrow four-month time frame. “We decided to create our own task-management system. Once users completed tasks, they would click ‘complete,’ and an e-mail would be sent to alert others.”
On the Pearson project, it generated more than 150,000 e-mails in 12 months. Plus, adds Johnson, it kept costs down and enabled a small internal team to manage the project.
Johnson was quick to see the utility of the Startranet system; the entire company now uses Startranet internally. As clients have seen it in action, they’ve contacted Star to request it be customized for them. The company has done just that, formatting the system to manage inventory and ordering processes for Pella Windows and Doors and ADC Telecommunications.
Given how the company is expanding its reach from the trade show floor to everyday client operations, it’s no wonder Johnson added “and Environments” to its name.