Situation

A refrigeration manufacturing company in business for more than 80 years has gradually expanded into a global enterprise from its original Midwestern roots, even as the company maintains the original St. Louis area location of its headquarters. As part of its growth, the company has added more acreage and facilities over time, with the operation now spread across several separate buildings.

Many of these buildings are distant enough to require transportation. It is therefore easy to envision that communications across the entire campus can be a challenge. Workers on the manufacturing floor receive important information much later than others, and in today’s world communication by email doesn’t guarantee that messages will be received and read in a timely manner. Company executives soon found a potential answer in digital signage, with the goal of communicating more efficiently with staff and visitors that frequent the manufacturing floors, lobbies and cafeterias across each location.

Solution

It wasn’t long before Carousel Digital Signage came onto the manufacturing giant’s radar, and the benefits of its first Carousel Cloud rollout phase quickly came to fruition view at the company’s headquarters. Upon initial testing of a few Carousel Cloud licenses the company quickly purchased 10 additional licenses and immediately put them to use.

The initial rollout has been localized to the main building, which houses executive business operations and a busy production floor. The next phase will expand the Carousel Cloud network to the other buildings on campus to ensure that corporate messages and useful information is disseminated quicker than possible today, before potentially rolling out the network to other business locations. 

The IT Director shares that the reception has been very strong, from the executive layer through to the plant managers and manufacturing teams that bring the company’s refrigeration products to life. “That’s true for both the people that are absorbing information presented on the displays to those who are logging into Carousel and uploading the content, he said, adding that several departments are already involved in content creation and management. “We expect others to get involved because it is so easy to learn and use.”

HR and food services were among the first to get involved in contributing content to the network. “We get a lot of visitors, so HR is actively involved in creating content for partners and customers that visit our lobbies as well as for staff,” said the company’s spokesperson. “They produce an array of motivational slides for workers on our production floors, and community-related content that appeals to everyone that works in our offices as they learn about local events of interest for their families. They also produce videos and leverage their media design creation skills for our lobby screens, which provides visitors with a compelling first impression as they enter the building.”

Benefits

The IT Director is actively involved in the overall creative vision for the Carousel Cloud network. That includes administering zones for content creation to HR and other departments, but in some cases he dives into the creative waters himself. He notes that Carousel Cloud provides an opportunity to flex their creative muscles, particularly when it comes to the design and creation of café menus. “Our CEO recognized the breakthrough of investing in digital signage software when he noticed how we modernized the food menus with videos, along with dynamic content in an adjacent screen zone that automatically updates.”

Seamless integration with AppleTV media players and Carousel Digital Signage’s partnership with Jamf put Carousel Cloud over the top. Jamf is a mobile device management (MDM) partner that specializes in bringing the Apple Experience to education and corporate environments, and Carousel’s partnership with Jamf makes it simple to convert Apple TV devices into digital signage media players. The IT team has worked almost exclusively with Apple over the past ten years of, and essentially made digital signage “instant” through their partnership with Carousel.

“Once we hardline out Apple TVs to Ethernet, they instantly become Carousel players. Jamf’s configuration profile locks down the players into a single app mode, which ensures no one can accidentally switch to another content source. It’s completely foolproof, and the two companies together make the entire operation easy for the IT department, as well as easily scalable to new locations.”