A company that provides repair and maintenance services for commercial aircraft wanted a way to communicate both events and safety information to employees on three shifts. It sought a system that would always be up to date, easy to maintain and interesting to employees. It discovered that StrandVision Digital Signage filled the bill and offered a number of administrative features that made running the signage even easier and versatile than expected.
An international aircraft services company with a major 400-employee maintenance and repair facility in the Southeast U.S. wanted to install a system for employee and safety communications that would reach all three shifts.
The corporate office had a digital signage system that was complex and expensive - too expensive for the maintenance operation to justify. Commented the Systems Support Analyst, "There would have been an internal chargeback and we could never justify putting that much money into it." They also did not have control over the content.
Early research for alternatives was not encouraging. They looked into developing a looped PowerPoint presentation "but it was too convoluted." All of the outside systems that the IT department considered required heavy investments in both hardware and software licenses.
Then they discovered StrandVision through an Internet search. It fit the bill perfectly. It had minimal equipment requirements, no licensing fees, low subscription costs, worked on the company's existing Ethernet network and was easy to administer.
The Systems Support Analyst quickly created a test digital sign using StrandVision's free demo capability, showed it to the General Manager and others and, within two weeks, had the system up and running.
The company deployed flat television screens located near its existing bulletin boards in the lunch room, lobby and in another public employee area -all on a single subscription plus low cost duplicate licenses. One of the screens was not near an existing wired network connection, so they set it up on a WiFi connection.
Administration was also easy. "We make PowerPoint slides constantly, so we just design them, send them to the StrandVision Digital Signage conversion utility and they automatically convert them to high resolution JPEGs for free. Then we add them to our page mix. It saves a lot of overhead time."
That's not the only StrandVision feature that the company takes advantage of. It also uses StrandVision's automated countdown count up capability to keep track of monthly operational statistics that include maintenance statistics and OSHA safety reports. The system automatically counts up each day that the facility does not have a reportable lost time incident. It also reports on other facilities, encouraging departmental competition on the all-important safety metric.
The company uses the StrandVision scheduler to insert the news for one hour per shift and automatically adds and removes slides for events as they approach and pass. They also show local weather and a frequently updated custom stock ticker that that shows the company's stock price.
The company also uses StrandVision's archiving feature. This allows the signs to be driven from a local server that is automatically updated from StrandVision every few minutes.
The digital signage system, which has been in place for a few years, is now a main communications tool. In addition to the applications mentioned above, topic pages include quality, employee health (screenings, blood drives, etc.), business performance, recycling, employee anniversaries, trivia and employee focus group findings. "All three shifts get the same accurate, timely information from our digital signs," the Systems Support Analyst concluded.