DHL Uses Digital Interactivity to Enhance the Innovation Center Experience

The Company

DHL is a global logistics titan headquartered in Germany that offers shipping, courier services, and international logistics worldwide. With a workforce of over 600K+ employees, this logistics giant operates in more than 220 countries and territories. DHL is essential in today's interconnected world, enabling commerce, supporting businesses, and making distances seem shorter with every package it delivers.

The Project

DHL boasts four Innovation Centers, one each in Chicago, Troisdorf, Dubai, and Singapore. These showrooms - used for client, prospect, and employee engagement - highlight the latest trends, insights, and technologies impacting logistics. Topics range broadly, such as Computer Vision & AI, Robotics &Automation, and the Internet of Things.

To elevate the visitor experience, the DHL Innovation Center team is focused on enhancing digital interaction for its guests. Digital content serves as a key element of this experience, playing a significant role throughout the tours. One example is the team's plan to recreate and adapt the DHL Logistics Trends Radar for their screens, transforming it into an interactive version where each element is touch-enabled to display additional information.

Challenges

The project had three notable challenges:

1. Content Flexibility
   DHL Innovation Center required a highly flexible solution to create interactive experiences that could support a wide range of media formats and layout options. They also needed a platform capable of running various web pages seamlessly without technical limitations. Moreover, it was essential for the solution to permit easy modifications without the need for custom coding, enabling swift and efficient updates.
2. Technical Support
   Reliable software support was critical to ensuring seamless delivery of the Innovation Center digital customer experiences. Given the digital component's importance in creating impactful visitor interactions, the team needed a solution backed by comprehensive documentation and responsive live support capable of addressing complex topics. This level of support was essential to maintaining uninterrupted operations and delivering a consistently high-quality experience.
3. Interconnectivity
   DHL Innovation Center aimed to establish interconnectivity between various devices, such as enabling tablets to remotely control content displayed on wall-mounted screens. Additionally, they sought to integrate sensors and other technologies that would allow different systems to interact with each other, such as using pick-up sensors to trigger video playback.
   
   

Solution

By using Intuiface, DHL Innovation Center was able to tackle those four challenges.

1. Content Flexibility
   Intuiface was originally conceived to simplify the delivery of kiosk-based interactive experiences. Its DNA is not constrained by the rigid zone-based layout and media format restrictions imposed by traditional digital signage. And its use of a very recent version of the Chromium web rendering engine ensures that all webpages can be displayed.
2. Technical Support
   Intuiface support resources run the gamut, from same-day technical support with dedicated personnel to a searchable, 400-article online library, a multiple-course online Academy, 100+ sample experiences, and 20+ recorded webinars. This meant self-service support was possible for most issues and timely collaboration with Technical Support for the more challenging issues.
3. Interconnectivity
   Intuiface’s web triggers feature enables experiences to communicate with one another over any network. Operable over both the intranet and the Internet, this remote communication protocol permits any event in one experience to trigger the execution of one or more events in any other number of experiences. Thus, tablet-based interactive experiences can be used to remotely select, play, and pause videos on an LED video wall and on a projection-based CenterPiece exhibit.

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Project Results

In just a couple of months, the team created seven (7) core experiences deployed across 30+ screens, with additional one-off experiences created for stand-alone displays unique to various center locations. Each experience is dedicated to a particular topic. Experiences vary from center-to-center and screen-to-screen with about 5% variation to accommodate differences due to each visitor and geographic location.

Originally, all content was stored locally. However, with Intuiface, all variations are now controlled remotely and easily rolled out to screens and centers on demand. This ensures centralized management to ensure a consistent look-and-feel across all centers while enabling easy variation to meet unique location needs.

DHL Innovation Center has made a significant shift towards self-sufficiency. This autonomy extends beyond just the initial brainstorming and deployment of these experiences; it includes managing the project's entire lifecycle. This includes ideation, implementation, and, crucially, the iterative process of testing and refining these experiences through continuous error correction cycles. This approach ensures that the installations remain dynamic, engaging, and reflective of the high standards expected by visitors and the brand.

According to the team, “Compared to the past, the level of autonomy we have today is remarkable! it's incredible how much we can accomplish on our own now.”

Planned improvements include sensor-based interaction, quizzes accessed through personal mobile devices, and the ability to compile and display quiz outcomes on monitors within any of the innovation centers.