Earl Enterprises® leads a family of restaurants with some of the most recognizable and successful brands in full-service dining. One of its brands, TooJay’s Gourmet Deli Restaurant & Bakery began with a single location on the island of Palm Beach in 1981. The brand was born out of the passion for creating classic recipes featuring the flavors of an authentic deli. Now, with multiple locations across Florida, TooJay’s serves hearty portions of homemade comfort foods, handcrafted sandwiches and made-from-scratch soups, salads and baked goods. Its extensive menu provides options for everyone––from kids to the whole family.

Challenge

For many years, TooJay’s utilized static digital signage devices to display the restaurant’s menus at each location. The solution required employees to manually maintain and update content on each screen at each location. As the brand expanded across the state, the process became time intensive and challenging to manage; and maintaining content consistency became difficult.

TooJay’s also wanted to deploy advanced capabilities beyond what the static menu boards could support, like the ability to customize content by location and perform menu updates and changes more easily.

“Even though [the static signage system] seemed like an inexpensive approach, when you add up the exorbitant amount of time it took to maximize the system’s features, it was not,” Tom Seeker, Chief Information Officer (CIO), Earl Enterprises explained. “We were very limited in what we could do.”

Hughes Solution

In selecting the Hughes Managed Digital Signage enterprise solution, TooJay’s goal was to display digital signage menu boards system-wide that could be updated and managed remotely from a single Content Management System (CMS).

“Now we have these beautiful devices mounted on our walls, with a back-end CMS management tool providing visibility into the health of the whole system,” Tom said. “I can go into the tool to confirm they’re all functioning, rather than wait for a call from a store that something is wrong. The system notifies me if there’s a problem.”

The digital menu boards enable TooJay’s to disseminate cohesive messaging that can be targeted to individual locations or a region, as well as to customers and employees. TooJay’s can distribute video messages to remind staff to put fresh tulips on the tables in anticipation of Mother’s Day or to follow safety precautions in the kitchen. Individual locations can welcome new team members after their onboarding. Customers can consider what looks most appetizing when deciding what’s for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Despite all the advanced capabilities of the Hughes solution, TooJay’s monthly recurring costs remained on par compared to their do-it-yourself (DIY) solution.

“It was a lesson in understanding what true costs are and what true capabilities are,” Tom explained. “Plus, we’re not spending our time troubleshooting.” During a recent system-wide menu update––which once required a manual menu refresh at each location––the process went so smoothly there was not a single call for help or complaint from any of the restaurants.

Watch Tom Seeker talk about the solution.

Hughes Technology

The Hughes Managed Digital Signage solution for TooJay’s includes:

• Enterprise-grade SmartTV screens integrated with Hughes MediaSignage players at each location. The SmartTV/players connect over the network to the Hughes cloud-based CMS platform.
• CMS access for TooJay’s marketing and creative teams, which enables them to upload, manage, schedule and disseminate content from a single location, along with the ability to target content by location, audience, screen and time of day or date.
• Network management services, spanning installation, proactive monitoring and fast remediation―both automated via the Hughes artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) capability and on-location, when needed, with field service personnel.
• Access to SmartScan technology, which enables the IT team to monitor the health of individual screens and the overall signage system.
• Round the clock 24/7 support and a nationwide team of field technicians.

Get more information about Hughes Digital Signage solutions.

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