
As part of a multi-year digital transformation project, NGC sought to improve communications and productivity on the factory floor as well as provide a modern lobby experience for one of its new, high-traffic buildings. The two primary goals of the project were to empower floor managers and technicians with real-time, data-driven information and ensure employees and visitors could easily navigate the 110-acre NGC campus.

While the goals for the new lobby experience revolved around showcasing the capabilities of digital signage including wayfinding, the team’s vision for digital signage on the production floor focused on improving quality and efficiency. But in a high-mix, low-volume production environment, with data coming from multiple systems, the right solution for various floors and projects required a high degree of flexibility.


The manufacturing industry, in general, struggles to democratize information, as data is often siloed in different systems, and it is challenging for anyone to gather that information and to make sense of it.

—Oscar Castillo, Factory Modernization & Digital Transformation Project Manager, Northrop Grumman

Compounding the issue of siloed information, simply unlocking the data is not enough—the team at NGC needed a way to aggregate that information, make it actionable, and help technicians and managers prioritize it. The team worked to automate as much of this process as possible, so sensors were added to manufacturing equipment and code was written to ensure that monitors were continuously sent production data, essentially letting the factory speak for itself. Because the production floor can be so dynamic, with constraints and priorities shifting continually, the NGC team also wanted to allow floor managers to easily control the content displayed, ensuring teams were kept in the loop. Their goal was to reduce span time due to slow communications channels, while also ensuring stringent quality standards were met. To illuminate the challenge of the work the team does, Oscar stated:

We're sending stuff into space. We can't send repair people to go and deal with something if it doesn’t work exactly as it’s designed to. That’s why quality is so important to us—once it's launched, it's launched. Anything we can do to help reduce the time it takes to produce a product and ensure its quality—that’s meaningful to Northrop Grumman. And that’s why we use digital signage on our production floors.

NGC selected Poppulo (formerly Four Winds Interactive) as its digital signage provider for the building’s lobby experience and production floor communications.

The initial implementation included an interactive wayfinding solution and a large interactive screen in the lobby designed to showcase the company’s mission, innovations, and more, as well as 15 screens on the production floor. The screens on the production floor were interactive, allowing managers and technicians to see top-level metrics and then drill-down into custom dashboards as needed. The solutions implemented were far-reaching, built to solve specific challenges NGC’s manager and technician communities faced every day.

One example is the NGC team’s factory floor screen showing real-time environmental conditions within a lab. Given the nature of the work done at the Space Park facility, certain specifications must be adhered to—in this case, the products must be built within specific environmental constraints. Otherwise, production must stop. Prior to implementing the screens showing temperature and relative humidity during dry months, floor managers would have to walk the floor multiple times a day, check the analog sensor readings, and communicate any necessary mitigation strategies back to everyone else—a time-consuming process. Today, all that information is readily available to everyone on the floor, and mitigation strategies are programmed to display if certain conditions are met. This alone democratizes the environmental information and empowers everyone on the floor to take action if needed, ensuring the floor operates efficiently without needing manager intervention.

One of the primary goals of our digital signage project was to improve situational awareness through better communication, freeing up time for both floor managers and technicians. I’m happy to say we accomplished that.
—Oscar Castillo

That solution was accompanied by screens displaying other operational efficiency metrics designed to reduce dwell times, enhance situational awareness, and improve communication on the production floor. To ensure the factory floor could speak for itself, Oscar and his team enabled managers to control the content on their screens, ensuring that critical information could be deployed—quickly—whenever the management team needed to. In addition to ensuring the managers could control the content their teams saw, regular user experience surveys helped refine what was displayed on the integrated, data-driven screens.

We knew the factory floor could move much faster with more real-time, integrated comms, but to make that a reality, we had to figure out a way to free all the information trapped in different systems and ensure people could access it whenever they needed to. Poppulo’s platform helped us realize that goal.
—Oscar Castillo


Northrop Grumman's digital signage network has significantly enhanced workplace communication, improved situational awareness and efficiency, reduced span time, enhanced site navigation, and more. However, its success wasn’t limited solely to the use cases the company initially sought to solve. Shortly after the factory floor signs were in place, the Health and Safety team inquired if they could get their content on those screens to help with its slips, trips, and falls campaign. Due to the flexibility of the Poppulo platform, that was easy, and by amplifying that campaign on digital signs, NGC’s health and safety team was able to reduce injuries.

Overall, Oscar and the team responsible for the project agree that it was, and still is, a success. According to Oscar, “Digital signage is definitely helping our production floor move more efficiently, which means shorter span times and improved quality.” Through feedback, additional applications have been developed, with one of the more recent data-driven use cases revolving around oven temperatures. This application was designed to show oven temperatures and trigger alerts if thresholds were met, reducing the need for re-work, and ensuring quality. This type of application—and many others in use at Northrop—are changing how the factory floor operates simply by democratizing and displaying key data.

The initial project’s success led to the continuous growth of Northrop’s digital signage network—today, the Space Park campus has 80 screens—but the use cases have also increased. Over time, the team added digital signage to its breakrooms and hallways, but those locations did not display production or wayfinding information. Instead, the screens in those areas were dedicated to organizational employee comms like anniversaries and new hire introductions. Additionally, they were used to celebrate significant accomplishments like the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope—a project that many team members at the Space Park had worked on for years.

With a multi-decade project like the James Webb Space Telescope, some people had spent their entire careers working on it. So, when it launched, there was a lot of pride, and we absolutely featured that—and the teams responsible—on our signs. Everyone loved seeing that.
—Oscar Castillo

Using the digital signage program at the Space Park as a blueprint, NGC's Chandler, Arizona, and Palmdale, California, facilities have each implemented screens to solve similar challenges. Due to the success of digital signage at the Space Park location, Poppulo now powers hundreds of digital signs across Northrop Grumman’s facilities. Leveraging innovative technology and a commitment to continuous improvement, NGC has created a more connected and productive workplace environment, reinforcing its dedication to excellence in all operations.



Aerospace

Northrop Grumman

Northrop Grumman Corporation (NGC), a leader in aerospace and defense manufacturing, embarked on a digital transformation project in 2018 to enhance operational efficiency at its “Space Park” facility in Redondo Beach, CA.

Improving Efficiency & Giving the Factory Floor a Voice at Northrop Grumman

When Adventist Health, an integrated health system located in the US West Coast and Hawaii, approached Poppulo in 2014 for digital signage at one of its California hospitals, the goal was to introduce public-facing screens at a single location to share information with patients and visitors. At first, the IT team managed all aspects of digital signage, including content. Over time, it became clear there was demand for digital signage systemwide. The flexibility of the software enabled expansion into additional applications, like employee-facing signage. As the network grew, the Marketing and Communications team was a natural partner to assume responsibility for content management.

Historically, the process of deploying content to the company’s digital signage was manual and time-consuming. Lengthy training was also required to learn to use the software. While the IT and MarCom team enjoyed Poppulo’s powerful digital signage authoring capabilities and advanced data integrations, monthly content updates took up to two full business days to complete. Additionally, all content requests had to go through one person. This slowed down both the process of getting screens updated quickly, and the development of new digital signage applications.

Jen Jacobs joined the Digital Marketing team at Adventist Health in 2018. Her main responsibility was to manage content for the growing digital signage network. But in order to truly expand the network to other facilities in the system, there needed to be a way for local contributors to manage their own signage.

Adventist Health needed a simpler way to update their screens. After exploring the new functionality offered by Poppulo Harmony Signage Cloud, it was clear that a cloud-based approach to digital signage management was the answer.

In January 2021, Jen began the process of migrating to Harmony Cloud with the support of the Poppulo team. By the beginning of February, the migration was complete. Jen began enjoying the benefits of migrating to Harmony Cloud immediately.

Poppulo Harmony Cloud’s user interface is so beautiful, intuitive, and easy to use—when there’s a problem with a screen, I’m even able to fix it from my phone.” –Jen Jacobs, Digital Marketing Manager at Adventist Health

Adventist Health's number of screens had grown organically over eight years. It was the move to Harmony Signage Cloud that boosted expansion by finally enabling multiple people to contribute content and manage screens. After the migration, Jen distributed 20 licenses to contributors in different locations, allowing each market to manage their own content. When a new contributor is added, Jen sends them a tutorial document and walks them through a 15-minute training - something that was not possible pre-migration.

Everyone saw the value and benefit of local content contribution, and everyone wanted more. They’re already creating this digital content—why not share it on digital signage and get it in front of more eyes?”—Jen Jacobs, Digital Marketing Manager at Adventist Health

One challenge the team faced related to growth was finding budget to purchase new hardware. However, digital signage is an effective tool for patient education. In some locations they applied for grants to fund the hardware needed for screens to keep patients informed (COVID-19 prevention, vaccine education, etc.). This enabled the network to grow even more rapidly.

As the digital signage network continued to expand, so did the variety of use cases. Today, Adventist Health powers its patient-facing and employee-facing screens, including wayfinding, directories, welcome screens, video walls, breakroom signage, menus, lobby installations, and other custom use cases with the Harmony Signage Cloud.

Today, 20 of Adventist Health’s 26 markets have digital signage. With 195 screens total—approximately 80% of which are patient-facing. the time it takes to update and manage content has decreased, despite the steady growth of their digital signage network. After migrating to the Harmony Signage Cloud, Jen saves 16 hours a month for content updates, and new screens are added in weeks, not months. The health system also saw a reduction in the amount of print signage needed, saving money by eliminating tens of thousands of dollars in printing costs, and improving Adventist Health’s environmental impact.

The real key to Adventist Health’s digital signage success has been the flexibility of Harmony Signage Cloud and the improvement in time-to-value. One of the ways they measure the success of digital signage is through engagement- they include custom QR codes in content so the audience can take action. For example, when an employee is retiring, colleagues can scan a QR code from a digital sign and be taken to a site to share their well-wishes. This not only allows Adventist Health to turn interest into action, but it streamlines the employee experience and enables the health system to support a culture of recognition. Another way that Adventist Health supports a culture of recognition on digital signage is by highlighting when nurses win DAISY Awards—an award given by the DAISY Foundation that recognizes a nurse who exemplifies each hospital's mission and values. DAISY awards have been proven to impact healthcare areas by contributing to a healthy work environment, improving nurse engagement, and enhancing the patient and family experience, so highlighting the nurses who are recipients has a positive impact on Adventist Health’s overall success.

There's so much potential with digital signage and it has become a key part of our communication plans. My favorite things are when new contributors begin to realize the power available in this tool and when local leaders specifically ask for things to be 'on the screens'." —Jen Jacobs, Digital Marketing Manager at Adventist Health

Looking to the future, Jen hopes to implement digital signage in every market in the Adventist Health system and train more local users to contribute content. She continues to look for more innovative ways to leverage the full capabilities of Poppulo Harmony Signage Cloud and better inform and engage patients and employees.

Healthcare

Adventist Health

Enhancing the patient & employee experience

Improving Patient & Employee Comms Across Adventist Health’s Hospital Network 

Over the years, this global manufacturing and construction company has undergone a complete transformation in the way it communicates with its employees.

After acquiring a company in 2019 with primarily Spanish-speaking employees, it became apparent that Roeslein needed a better way to communicate key information in multiple languages. With many mergers and acquisitions on the horizon, Roeslein’s communications team tasked with finding a scalable solution that would enable the company to translate comms and better reach their desked and deskless workforce—today this is comprised of over 195 construction workers, over 520 manufacturing floor workers, 180 field workers, and 420 office workers.

Initially, the team started using its marketing email platform for internal email comms because the tool was already in place. But with employees working in a variety of roles at a growing number of locations, the comms team quickly realized they needed the ability to look at how comms performed by role, location, and campaign in order to understand if they were reaching each segment of their workforce—and that functionality was lacking in the company’s marketing email tool.

And since the team managing global communications was made up of only four people, they needed a consolidated platform that was easy to learn and use so that they could efficiently reach workers on all channels without having to manage disparate platforms.

Roeslein’s comms team also realized that its employees on the manufacturing floor weren’t receiving email comms due to a combination of lack of access to devices and regional laws restricting them from checking devices while on the floor, so the team began printing emails and posting them on message boards—costing money and time reprinting things every time a new email went out.

To address the communication gap with employees in its manufacturing facilities, the company implemented its first digital signage solution in 2018. While having the ability to push comms to screens in select facilities was beneficial, the comms team realized they lacked governance over the platform, resulting in a combination of outdated content and non-compliance with corporate branding and messaging guidelines.

To better reach and engage the company’s global workforce, both communications solutions needed to be optimized.

In 2022, the company began looking for a more user-friendly digital signage solution. Key requirements for the new platform included global scalability, powerful user governance, and intuitive content contribution capabilities. Having acquired several more US-based and international locations, it was critical that the company’s comms team could enable a balance of global and local content easily. Poppulo met Roeslein’s requirements, providing autonomy for location-specific communication champions to reach deskless workers with their own content, in their own language, without breaking brand guidelines, while also making the solution easy to scale and manage.

Although the initial reason Roeslein approached Poppulo was to replace an incumbent digital signage provider, the team soon saw that Poppulo would allow them to replace both their legacy digital signage platform as well as their email comms platform, further streamlining how the company reached its various employee segments. This realization quickly sparked a deep dive into the Harmony platform’s email analytics capabilities, as Roeslein’s comms team believed that more in-depth engagement metrics would enable better communication over time. It was critical that the platform also integrated with their existing enterprise tools like Microsoft SharePoint and Teams, which Poppulo enabled them to do through Feeds.

Over the course of four months, Roeslein implemented Harmony Digital Signage, Email, and Feeds at each of their existing locations.The communications team posts every piece of content on Feeds, which integrates with Microsoft Teams and SharePoint so that workers can access the information they need at any time. Employees also have the ability to sign up for comms by theme, enabling them to receive communications around the topics they care about. For deskless workers without access to devices or for those who don’t regularly check their email, relevant localized content is deployed to digital signage throughout 6 of their facilities so that they can receive information by glancing at the screens. The Harmony platform also allows users to easily translate comms into other languages without changing the user experience or look and feel of the comms being deployed.

Looking to the future, Roeslein’s comms team plan to roll out the Poppulo mobile app in late 2023 to further extend the reach of its comms for field and manufacturing floor workers—an announcement that will be included in one of the team’s other comms channels, its annual print magazine.

Roeslein’s new communications capabilities have become a critical part of the onboarding process, as the company continues to acquire more locations—especially those where English isn’t the primary language. Since implementing the Harmony platform, the team has been able to more easily communicate who their company is to new employees, easing the transition and ensuring everyone is aligned around the same mission, values, and goals. Today, all recently acquired companies go through an onboarding program designed to introduce employees to the company culture, and all of the communication channels—email, digital signage, Feeds, and eventually mobile—one at a time.

In late 2021, Roeslein acquired an oil and gas company based out of Denver and moved operations from an existing facility in the area to the new location. Unlike the existing facility, the new location didn’t have digital signage in place. Despite not initially buying into the value of digital signage, the executive director immediately noticed the difference that it made not having screens, and requested the comms team implement digital signage in the new facility as soon as possible.

Additionally, with Poppulo’s analytics capabilities, the communications team can see which employees are engaging the most with different pieces of content, segmented by location, role, and other key demographics. This allows them to identify the groups of workers that they aren’t reaching with comms so that they can look into the problem and adjust their strategy as necessary. Before Poppulo, the communications team saw an average open rate below the industry average of 63%. Today, they’re seeing 85% open rates across all channels—proving that there’s value in investing in internal comms.

Roeslein & Associates continues to grow quickly, acquiring new companies and adding new locations across the world, and the communications team is still looking to add new channels, grow their capabilities, and improve comms across the organization.

Construction/Manufacturing

Roeslein & Associates

While navigating frequent mergers and acquisitions, this global manufacturing construction company recognized the need for a consolidated comms platform to reach deskless and in-office workers through key internal comms channels.

Roeslein & Associates Consolidates Platforms to Improve Global Comms for Manufacturing, Field, and Office Workers 

 of American workers reported experiencing burnout in the workplace—and that number continued to increase throughout 2022.

Burnout not only affects company culture by negatively impacting employee sentiment, but it also costs companies in multiple ways. When someone takes time away from work to treat an illness, the company pays for the time and treatment. And when employees aren’t happy, they leave—forcing employers to spend time and money advertising for a new job, training new workers, and getting them up to speed.

None of this is new to Nancy Scicchitani, Senior Benefits & Global Wellbeing Manager at Nuance, or Meredith Mascolo, Senior Manager of Communications at Nuance. After the pandemic caused a massive shift in the world of work and burnout and attrition became a key focus in the media, Nancy and Meredith sought a solution to address the concern before it became a widespread problem at Nuance.

Burnout can cost a company three times the amount it would take to just address it.” — Nancy Scicchitani, Senior Benefits & Global Wellbeing Manager

Both knew that the solution for employee burnout couldn’t be handled solely by the IC or Benefits teams. After coming together and realizing that burnout is a serious business problem that they needed to tackle together, Nancy and Meredith partnered to implement a new employee communications campaign around wellness. They sought a way to consistently communicate about wellness initiatives and educate employees about burnout, without overwhelming them with a barrage of content.

To maximize the reach of their comms, Meredith knew it was essential to communicate about these topics through their most effective comms channel: email. 

The Poppulo platform enabled them to clearly communicate with employees through email, plus personalize and target messages for unique employee groups, and gather insight from metrics to continuously improve the way they communicate. Over three months, the Communications and Benefits teams worked together to design and implement their wellness campaign.

They started by using the communications channels they already had in place, including their company-wide weekly newsletter, called Take 5, which features all types of stories about products, wins, learning, recognition, culture, and other announcements. When they kicked off their wellness campaign, they started featuring articles on the importance of taking care of yourself, promoting wellness tools and challenges, and sharing resources the company invests in to show support for employees. Each edition also contains an employee survey on a relevant topic, built through Poppulo, to help gauge employee engagement and encourage employees to check out the next issue to see the results.

Every piece of content is posted on the company Intranet, and Take 5 points employees there so they know where all information can be found. The team also manages several Microsoft Teams channels—including a company-wide channel and a channel dedicated to wellness—that they direct employees to via newsletters to foster conversations around relevant topics, like self-care, healthy living, and fitness. Using newsletters and email comms to direct employees to channels like Teams and the Intranet drives greater adoption of existing technology, demonstrating the value of investing in tech.

In addition to Take 5, Nuance has three targeted newsletters sent to employees regularly. First, they have a quarterly wellness newsletter called Be Well, Work Well, dedicated to total wellness—including mental health, physical health, community engagement, financial well-being, and more. They also have a quarterly manager newsletter to share tools and resources with people managers, as well as a monthly career development newsletter. Each of these can be personalized and targeted by department or location when a message is only relevant to a specific audience.

I can’t imagine what my job would look like without Poppulo. I rely on it so much today—I never want to go back to the old way of communicating.” — Meredith Mascolo, Senior Manager of Communications

Since kicking off the wellness campaign, the team has seen high engagement and interest from employees. 

They’ve been able to share engagement metrics with leaders to prove that their communications are landing with employees, driving greater support for comms investment.

The beauty of Poppulo is the metrics. We can prove that our comms are working. We can say with certainty that people are looking at them.” — Nancy Scicchitani, Senior Benefits & Global Wellbeing Manager

In one example, a team of interns ran a two-week campaign called Work it Out to encourage employees to prioritize their wellness by making minor lifestyle improvements. They leveraged the Poppulo platform to direct employees to a Teams channel where they could participate, resulting in the involvement of more than 700 employees—a massive increase from previous programs that had less than 200 participants. The Teams channel was highly active, with hundreds of comments and high engagement. By using an integrated approach to communicate with targeted groups through Poppulo and drive them to take action, the team at Nuance not only saw incredible engagement through the metrics but also accomplished their overall objective of getting employees to talk about wellness.

Today, the Benefits and Communications teams at Nuance continue to work together to combat employee burnout through a consistent, integrated approach to employee comms. The engagement metrics they’ve seen with Poppulo prove that they’re maximizing the impact of their comms. Since implementing Poppulo in 2019, the team has seen an average open rate of 79%—beating the industry standard by over 15%. 

In addition to partnering with Benefits, the Internal Comms team has enabled over 25 users in various departments, including Marketing, R&D, Legal, Security, and more. “We have people across the whole company using Poppulo,” says Meredith, “People who aren’t even communicators but want to make sure their communications are in line with what they should be.”

Meredith and Nancy continue to look for innovative ways to leverage the full capabilities of Poppulo to communicate with employees about the importance of taking care of themselves—reducing burnout and, ultimately, driving value for the business.

Technology

Nuance

After seeing a rise in employee burnout as a result of the pandemic, the Communications and Benefits teams at Nuance partnered to boost awareness around physical and mental wellness.

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Improving Efficiency & Giving the Factory Floor a Voice at Northrop Grumman

Improving Patient & Employee Comms Across Adventist Health’s Hospital Network

Roeslein & Associates Consolidates Platforms to Improve Global Comms for Manufacturing, Field, and Office Workers

Efficient employee communications starts with Poppulo.