Digital signage for factories and warehouses.

Where the screens go

A factory or a warehouse has more wall than any shop, and most of it is the wrong place for a screen. Put screens where people stop or pass every shift, not where there happens to be space.

At the entrance to the hall, by the time clock, is where the day starts. This is the screen for the whole site: today's targets, the days without an accident, this week's notices. Everyone passes it twice a shift.

At the end of a line or above a work area, the screen belongs to the people working there: the figures for their line, their target and where it stands. One table, readable from the workstation, does more here than a rotation of ten things.

At the loading docks, drivers and dock staff want the time, the weather and anything about the yard that changed this morning — a Clock, the Weather app and a Ticker.

In the break room and the canteen, people sit down and have a few minutes. This is the place for the longer things: the training schedule from Google Calendar, a procedure as a Google Slides deck, the week's canteen menu on the Menu board.

How big, and how high

Distances in a hall are longer than they look. The rule of thumb in the hardware guide: the furthest reader should be no more than six screen heights away for large text, four for a table read line by line. For a screen read from four or five metres that means 55" to 65"; for one read across the hall, 75" and up.

Mount screens high enough to clear forklifts, pallets and racking, and tilt them toward where people stand. A screen above the walkway is read on the move, so give it less to say than the one by the time clock.

A table of figures wants landscape; a notice or a count works either way. Decide on the day you mount the screen, and set the orientation on the screen in the dashboard.

Putting the shift's figures on the wall

SignageStack does not talk to your machines, your MES or your ERP. The figures come from a Google Sheet, and the Google Sheets app shows that sheet as a table that follows it within about a minute. Who or what fills the sheet is up to you: a shift lead typing in the hourly count, an export from your own system, a formula that pulls from the planners' spreadsheet.

A few things make a sheet work on a wall:

• A sheet made for the screen. The app shows the first tab, with row 1 as the headings. Give the wall its own short sheet rather than pointing it at the spreadsheet the planners work in.
• Few columns, big numbers. Line, target, actual, difference. A handful of columns reads from across the hall; a whole planning sheet does not.
• Fewer rows. A long table turns its pages on its own, but every extra page is one more to wait for. Show the rows that matter on this shift.

If the figures already live in a dashboard tool with a public share link, the Web page app can show that page instead — as long as the tool allows itself to be embedded.

Safety content that gets read

Days without an accident. The Countdown app also counts up: give it a title and the date and time of the last incident, and it shows the days, hours and minutes since — on its own, even offline. When there is an incident, someone has to change the date — decide who before the screen goes up.

One rule at a time. A procedure that runs to four pages belongs in the break room, as a PDF whose pages turn on their own or as a Google Slides deck. On the floor, use the Text app for one instruction at a time, in type large enough to read from the aisle.

Short notices in the Ticker. A visitor on site, a blocked aisle, a drill on Thursday: a line in the Ticker runs along the edge of every screen you choose, over whatever else is playing. Take it out when it is over, so people keep reading it.

The alert, written in advance. Emergency Alert takes over every screen you choose within a second of being switched on, including screens that are dark outside their working hours. A person switches it on in the dashboard; it is not connected to your alarms or sensors. Write the evacuation message now, pick the screens, leave it off, and make switching it on part of the drill.

Shifts, hours and more than one site

Set each screen's working hours to the shift pattern: Always on for a site that runs around the clock, a start and an end for each weekday for one that does not. Outside those hours the screen goes dark and comes back for the next shift, on its own clock.

The screens do not change playlists by time of day. Most sites do not need them to: the figures change through the sheet, and the rest suits every shift.

Give shift leads their own login as Members, so they can change content, and managers a Viewer login to look without touching anything. The dashboard speaks English, Serbian, German, Spanish and Italian; what is on the screen is in whatever language you write it, and the Zones app can put two languages side by side.

Every plant and warehouse sits in the same dashboard. The screens list shows when each player was last seen and what it is playing, so a dark screen in another building shows up without anyone walking over. And the playback report — a PDF for one screen or all of them, which can be emailed on a schedule — shows which safety notice ran on which screen, and when.

Mistakes that are easy to avoid

• Wi-Fi in a steel hall. Racking, machines and moving forklifts make it unreliable. Run a cable.
• A consumer TV in a warm, dusty hall. It is built for a few hours a day in a living room, not for three shifts.
• A screen that does not come back after a power cut. Check for automatic power-on before you buy, and prefer a box that starts as soon as it gets power.
• A counter nobody resets. If one number on the wall is wrong, people stop believing the rest.