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Business & Industry
Frito-Lay: Making
AxisTV Its Own
If you work about an
hour north of Indianapolis, snow hazards are hardly unknown. But if
you’re one of the 1,500 people who work for Frito-Lay at its 28-acre
manufacturing complex, you just might hear news of one on what employees
call ‘Frito-vision’.
Frito-vision is in fact
an AxisTV system, implemented in the spring of 2007. Project Manager
Rick Crick explains, “The plant operates around the clock. If there’s a
snow emergency and people are working, we have to mobilize them to leave
quickly. If we had to, we could put something up fast that says ‘We’re
shutting the facility down. Perform these steps.’ These are the things
you can get out to the site very quickly.”
The growing complex
consists in part of two manufacturing plants, two warehouses, a
wastewater treatment plant and a coal-fire generating plant. Before
AxisTV, communicating vital information to a diverse employee base was
always a manual process. “We had a lot of easels and bulletin boards
and things like that in public traffic areas,” says Crick. “We wanted
to get away from that. It required a lot of administrative effort, and
it’s just not conducive to a well-organized facility. “
Frito-vision consists of
two channel players, a 50” plasma display in the main foyer, a 37” LCD
in the cafeteria, and a 42” LCD in warehouse operations. Thanks to
AxisTV’s screen saver feature, it extends even beyond that. When desktop
monitors go into screen saver mode, they become additional AxisTV
endpoints. For a dispersed facility, that option makes it more
affordable to broaden distribution of content. “We’ve deployed that
feature to remote offices like the receiving office and shipping, which
are several hundred feet from the front area,” said Crick.
Each part of the
facility has different needs, so AxisTV gets put to different uses.
Crick listed some of them: “Our HR department uses it pretty extensively
for HR events – benefits rollout, a blood drive – and they’ll display
weather notifications and birthdays. Our warehouse operations uses it
for performance data and scorecarding…and we had pictures of a forklift
accident in another facility so we could emphasize safety.”
Crick finds the system’s
flexibility essential. “We can have one packet of information presented
at each location rather than send someone around with PowerPoint®
decks,” he explained. “Or if we had an accident that we needed to
communicate just to the warehouse, we could push it to the channel
player in those specific areas.”
Crick added that video
capabilities enhance training, and he cited a new case picking system in
the warehouse. “I shot maybe five minutes of video with my personal
camera and posted that on Frito-vision with some slides, and it was way
more effective than trying to wordsmith information about how the system
worked. In a site as dynamic as ours, there’s something like that every
week.”
Crick was familiar with
AxisTV from the church he attends, where its range of capabilities are
well used. Unlike the church though, the plant has no IT or creative
resources to devote to digital signage. However, Crick praises AxisTV’s
ease of use. “I think the main advantage from my standpoint is that it
allows you to create communications and get them out there very quickly,
especially when you’re in a large-scale environment. If I need, I can
have something published within all the critical areas within 15
minutes. You save some money on paper and ink, and that’s important. The
real benefit that I see is that anyone trained on the system can create
a visual communication on their PC and get it to the masses without ever
having to leave their desk.”
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