KFC Barbados uses LiveSign to manage digital signage across its restaurant locations, including menu boards and promotional displays.
“Live keeps us ahead of competitors and ticks all the boxes.”
KFC Barbados
Why menu boards are the hardest screens in the estate
A menu board looks like the simplest signage there is, and it is the one most likely to cause a real problem, because it is the only screen in a restaurant that a customer makes a purchasing decision from. A wrong price on a promotional display is embarrassing. A wrong price on a menu board is a dispute at the till.
That puts three demands on the software that a lobby screen never makes.
Prices have to be right everywhere at once. A price change that reaches eleven of twelve restaurants is worse than one that reaches none, because the estate is now inconsistent and nobody knows which board is wrong. Central scheduling against a display group is what makes a change atomic across the network rather than a task list someone works through.
The board changes through the day, not through the week. Breakfast comes off, lunch goes on, an evening promotion runs after a fixed hour. That is dayparting, and it has to happen on schedule without anyone in the restaurant touching anything, because the person on shift at 10:30 has other things to do.
It cannot go black during service. A dark menu board in the middle of a lunch rush stops the queue moving. The Live players cache their scheduled content and play it from local storage rather than streaming it, so a network problem at one site is something the support desk sees before the customers do.
Specifying signage for a restaurant network
Count the positions per restaurant first, then the number of price and menu changes you make in a year. Those two numbers drive both the hardware order and the costing below the page, and they are usually higher than an operator estimates once limited-time offers and seasonal pricing are included.
If you are planning menu boards across a restaurant network, ask sales for a reference call.