What Industries Use Digital Signage?

Digital signage is used in almost every industry that has customers, passengers, patients or staff to communicate with. The largest users are retail, restaurants and quick-service food, and transport, followed by healthcare, education, corporate offices, hotels and venues, banking and manufacturing. Places of worship, gyms, councils and public buildings use it too.

What changes from one industry to the next is the job the screen does. In a shop the aim is to sell. In a station or hospital it is to inform and direct. In an office, school or factory the audience is staff or students, and the screens replace notice boards and printed reports. The job decides the screen, the player and the software, and the site decides how tough the hardware needs to be.

The table summarizes how each sector typically uses digital signage and what that means for the hardware.

Retail and food service are the most visible users. Shops use screens in windows to draw people in, at the shelf edge to show prices and promotions, and as kiosks to extend the range on sale. Restaurants and quick-service chains use digital menu boards that change between breakfast and lunch, hide items that have sold out and update prices across every branch at once.

Self-service is a growing share of this. Ordering kiosks, click-and-collect points and self-checkouts combine a touchscreen, a computer and a payment terminal. Our kiosk computers page covers the hardware behind them. Hotels and venues use the same tools for welcome screens, event schedules, directories and large LED walls.

In transport, signage is about information more than promotion. Departure boards, platform screens, bus-stop displays and on-board passenger information systems have to be readable in daylight and keep running through heat, cold and vibration. Screens on trains are usually stretched panels above doors, and the computers that drive them are typically built to the EN 50155 standard for railway electronics, like our EN 50155 rail computers.

Hospitals and clinics use touchscreen wayfinding, queue-calling screens and waiting-room information. Schools, universities and councils use signage for news, timetables, room signs and emergency alerts, often across many buildings managed from one place. In places of worship, screens show hymns, readings and notices.

Factories and warehouses use digital signage to put live information in front of shift teams: output against target, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), quality alerts, andon calls and safety messages. Showing near misses, required protective equipment and lost-time records on screens at entrances and break areas is one of the most common ways sites use signage to reduce accidents.

Factory floor dashboards put each line’s numbers where the team can see them: output against target, takt time, downtime and its causes, scrap and OEE for the shift. The figures come straight from the line’s controllers, the SCADA system or the manufacturing execution system, so the screen updates as the line runs instead of on a printed report the next morning. This is visual management in the lean sense: problems become visible at a glance to the people who can fix them.

Andon boards show calls for help. When an operator presses an andon button or pulls a cord, or a machine raises a fault through its PLC, the board shows the station, the type of call (maintenance, quality or materials) and how long it has been open, often alongside a stack light at the station. Unanswered calls can escalate to supervisors’ screens after a set time.

Safety messaging covers PPE reminders for each zone, near-miss and incident updates, days since the last lost-time accident and induction notes for visitors and contractors. Messages can run in several languages for a mixed workforce, and many signage systems can switch every screen to an emergency message when a fire or evacuation system triggers them.

Warehouses use the same screens at dock doors and pick zones for loading schedules, pick rates and carrier cut-off times. The screens are usually industrial monitors driven by digital signage players, or panel PCs where operators need to touch the screen to acknowledge a call.

Industrial signage has tougher hardware needs than a shop or office:

The software and content differ by sector, but the hardware choices come down to the same few questions: how bright the screen must be, whether people will touch it, how many hours a day it runs, and how much heat, dust, moisture or vibration it faces. A quiet indoor office and a drive-through lane can run the same signage software on very different screens and players. Our factory automation page shows how the same approach carries into production sites.

Whatever the sector, we supply signage players with the operating system and signage software loaded and tested, and displays configured for the site, as standard. Our digital signage hardware page shows the full range.