Why Frontline Teams Need Data-Driven Screens

Key Takeaways

• Frontline workers often miss consistent updates because they lack access to the collaboration tools used by office-based teams.
• Paper notice boards and manually shared spreadsheets quickly become outdated, especially in fast-changing operational environments.
• Screens should move beyond looping media and become web-driven, integrated sources of real-time operational truth.

Topics

• Digital Signage
• Communications
• Data & Analytics
• Enterprise Solutions

Transcript

You know, this became acutely obvious to us during COVID, when a lot of the other places that were using ScreenCloud were shut down, that actually the supply chain, logistics, manufacturing, et cetera, healthcare, and, you know, the list goes on, they didn't shut down, and communication became ever more important. Now, for those of us that were lucky enough to work from home during that unsafe period, we were given an abundance of tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom, whatever it might be. Almost too many tools, you might argue, a little bit too much noise. But what about the people actually in these other environments? You know, predominantly they're getting most of their updates inconsistently by word of mouth. And again, there could be 24/7 shifts. It doesn't mean the manager's doing a poor job, but is everyone getting the same message? And what happens if that message changes, especially in an uncertain period? I think also as a society, we've started to see that really, you know, the world collapses if the supply chain and all of these people who are working, you know, to build these products and get these products shipped to our doors, like, is somewhat important. And I think we're seeing a greater emphasis on the need for these people to be well paid, to be well informed, and looked after. And you've got a majority millennial workforce now who are not really putting up with having terrible communication from a 1970s technology, which is basically paper printed out on a notice board, especially if that's data. Because, I mean, that might be a spreadsheet that got emailed to a line manager, but that's out of date by the time it's put up on the notice board, if it even gets switched out at all. So I suppose the argument I'm making here is for the use case for screens to be used way more predominantly in these environments. And then ultimately, ScreenCloud's job is to try and make that as reliable and simple and straightforward as possible for those customers, and to try and automate as much of the heavy lifting as we can. And we tend to do that with integrations, but by basically taking a web developer-centred approach and trying to move away from thinking of this as bits of content and media, which is kind of more the retail experience where you're seeing images and videos, like looping around. That's fine for a customer in the Apple Store, but not if you're looking at a screen 20, 30 times a day trying to make decisions based on your environment. That needs to be data-driven, therefore it needs to be web-driven to be a source of truth.