Transportation expertReTrans, a Kuehne + Nagel Company, tapped Six Feet Up for help to develop a custom application that is able to pull and push a variety of internal and external data into a digital signage system.
As a major provider of logistics and shipping services, ReTrans was looking for a way to keep its employees informed about ongoing weather conditions nationwide, as well as other internal key metrics. The company had developed an interest in digital signage technology to easily share information within their corporate offices and warehouses. They were looking for a flexible system that would work with their Python-based internal applications.
Working closely with ReTrans' executive team, Six Feet Up went over the business needs and technical constraints, researched several off-the-shelf digital display solutions, and determined that it would be best for to develop a custom dashboard application.
Six Feet Up deployed a custom digital signage application using an agile development process, with rapid prototyping and an ongoing back-and-forth feedback loop with ReTrans.
The new system presents a variety of information in a multi-panel template with several rotating screens. Content includes both internal and external data, such as fuel price from the Department of Energy, weather maps from the Weather Channel, news feeds from CNN, ReTrans' internal shipment information, etc.
The application is based on Dashing, an open source technology developed by Shopify. It uses a REST API, which makes it easy to pull data from any Python applications developed by ReTrans, including the company's Django-based transportation management system.
Six Feet Up also took advantage of many prebuilt functionalities, including RSS feeds, a rotator widget, and Rickshaw, a Javascript helper for the D3 graphing library, that was used to generate beautiful charts using JSON coming directly from the company's database.
Eventually the digital signage system will be able to present specific data using different layouts depending on the geographic location of the displays.
The agile approach used by Six Feet Up and ReTrans allowed the two companies to partner very closely throughout the development process and led to a very quick production deployment.
Six Feet Up, Inc.
11208 Windermere Blvd.
Fishers, IN 46037 - USA
Phone: +1 (317) 861-5948
Email: info@sixfeetup.com
