How a college restaurant automatically generates digital signage messages
Imagine the following situation. You enter a self-service restaurant, pick up a platter and want to start exploring the menu. Confused by the illogical arrangement of the restaurant, you don’t see any menu and end up choosing a moderate dish that seems ‘okay’. You pay for your food at the counter and a few seconds after the machine says ‘payment successful’, you discover a stand serving your favorite type of sushi, hidden around the corner.
The customer: a college restaurant
In a self-service restaurant, clear communication and an efficient buying process are closely linked to visibility. You don’t want people to pile up in front of the counter, pulling and pushing to find out what’s on the menu. Or to feel frustrated because they didn’t get what they actually wanted.
That is why our customer, a college restaurant, wanted to use digital signage to display what’s on the menu. To guide students to the right counter, they came up with the idea of colour coding. Each colour represented a type of kitchen: green for vegetarian food, red for Asian, blue for Italian, etc.
At the entrance of the restaurant were installed 6 different screens, guiding the students to the kitchen type they liked, through the colour coding system. Above the individual counters, the customer had also installed 3 monitors to display the menu of that day.
The customer’s digital signage question
The customer wanted an automatic data flow between the digital signage platform and the restaurant’s data system. The goal? Automatically display menus on the restaurant screens.
At the end of every week, the chef inserts data about next week’s menu: photos, a list of ingredients, the number of calories, allergy info … That information is automatically sent to the management, who determines how much the dishes will cost. Next, the menu info is sent to different food suppliers and in the end gets automatically converted to digital signage messages. With an attractive design, of course.
As explained earlier, each counter had a specific color and 3 screens. The digital signage messages had to be displayed either separately on each screen, or as one big message, stretched out over the different screens.
How Centoview helped
Faced with a new data connection challenge, our team of developers came up with a tailor-made communication system between the customer’s data and the Centoview system architecture. They made sure the data flow was stable and secure, guaranteeing that the technical part was solid and reliable.
The design team came up with an attractive template for the menus, respecting the colours of the colour coding system. As a plus, the customer could independently upload images of each course.
Why the customer chose Centoview
Our customer was looking for a digital signage platform that could provide a tailor-made data connection. Not an obvious requirement to meet. Centoview was able to meet that requirement, thanks to its broad technical foundation and extensive features.
As a plus, the design had to be attractive and professional. And it’s not always easy to find a solution that offers both technical complexity and a sense for aesthetics. Luckily, Centoview provided both.