The holidays are just around the corner, so we thought this was the perfect time to offer you some festive new features and highlight additional tools that were released in the last couple of months. We’ve been hard at work to make Ayuda your one-stop shop for static OOH, everything you need, all in one platform. That’s why we’ve made it easier to access business operations, made it possible to create campaign purchase orders, improved the UI, and made a bunch of other improvements that should help you work more efficiently.
Want to know more? Get nice and cozy and let us show you the latest from the Ayuda Platform.
Create purchase orders at the campaign level
Once your campaign has been fully charted and you know what materials you’ll need, you can create, manage, and edit purchase orders right from your campaign. Need fifty posters from your printing vendor? Make a PO in minutes that is linked to your campaign and keep your work centralized.
Along with POs, it is now possible to produce purchase order reports. You can use these to send service requests to your vendors and keep track of campaign-specific documentation. It’s also possible to customize your purchase order report footers. For example, users could choose to include a delivery address, contact information, or any other information useful to their vendors. This custom footer enhancement can be enabled with a Broadsign Services representative.
A faster way to access Operations
Running day-to-day operations shouldn’t be a headache for media owners. That’s why we’ve added access to Operations directly from the Splash Admin navigation menu. Gone are the days of working through the BMS System Administrator Connector. Now, it’s just one click away. Mac users out there will also be pleased to hear that the Operations Tab is available in HTML5, unlike the connectors, which only run on Windows OS.
We’re also pleased to introduce Vendor Types to the roster of Operations functionalities you’re used to. This new feature allows you to categorize your vendors under different types, making it easier to track them. Create your own custom types such as printing companies, maintenance companies, and so on.
Better UI and documentation to improve usability
The way you find data in the platform or documentation should be easy. That’s why we’ve made some small, but mighty, enhancements to face information, site information, and our documentation portal. A face’s details will now show a picture of the specific face, as well as a map of its location. Similarly, when you look up a particular site’s information, you’ll be shown a map. Both the face image and the face and/or site lat/long coordinates must be provided for these features.
The Ayuda documentation portal has been rearranged to make navigation easier. You can now search by topic, such as static, digital, designs, etc. We’ve also added a brand new section on static proof-of-play. It includes an introduction to static POP, guides to using the BMS POP connectors, and anything else you might need. Lastly, we’ve improved colour contrast and readability, we can all appreciate something that’s a little easier on the eyes!
Take a look at some of the great features that might’ve flown under your radar:
Free up space by retiring obsolete designs
Retiring designs can be useful if you have a lot of advertising content on your instance, especially obsolete media files and static copies. Retired designs will be filtered out, which means fewer designs to sort through, saving you time. There are a couple of things to keep in mind before you retire a design:
- If a design is allocated to a face on a “Sold” or “Contracted” campaign, you’ll be able to retire it only after the work orders are completed.
- If the campaign is not “Sold or Contracted”, you cannot retire the design until it is allocated.
Additional Revenue was upgraded with more fields
If needed, the upgraded fields allow a user to capture more details about the additional revenue associated with the campaign, which was not being captured before. These fields help break out the details of the additional revenue costs, so they can be further assessed. The new fields include:
- Quantity
- Artwork Due Date
- Unit Cost
- Face Size
- Brand
Eliminate unnecessary work orders and lower operational costs
The Rides feature allows you to extend postings from an initial segment or booking. This means you can eliminate the need to duplicate work orders, or to reorder and reprint copy, when you’re just looking to extend the runtime of a campaign that will already be up. The most common use of Rides is when one design is used throughout a static campaign that uses consecutive segments. When you use Rides to extend a design from your first segment to the next consecutive segments, it signals that no copy changes are required.
One of the largest benefits of this feature is that you will have lower operational costs, as you are not sending out bill posters to a location where no changes are needed. The feature automatically eliminates the work orders that would have been generated, saving on operational costs, as well as extra unnecessary data in the system.
Rides can span one segment to another, and even link two different static campaigns from the same advertiser. The following conditions must be met to use Rides:
- The media must be static.
- The design must be the same.
- The copy must be posted on exactly the same faces as the initial booking.
- The periods must be consecutive.
Once the conditions are met, Rides can be useful in a number of circumstances. Watch the demo for a more in-depth look:
Save editing time and avoid repetitive tasks
The Bulk Copy Change feature allows you to schedule copy changes to some or all static faces in a campaign. It’s no longer necessary to individually edit each design on a booking if an advertiser wants to change their posters. This should save your chartists or static copy managers a lot of editing time. Now, you can use this feature to bulk edit designs on multiple bookings in a few simple steps.
Easier sorting, searching, and filtering in work orders
We’ve added some extra columns to work orders to make it simpler to find what you’re looking for. You can now sort, filter, or search using the following attributes:
- Site Category
- Order on Site
- Posting Note
- General Note
These new columns can also be included in exported CSV reports.
Added security with SSO
Weak or repeated passwords can leave an account vulnerable to hacking. Single sign-on, also known as SSO, is widely used and considered to be more secure than manually typing your username and password. We’ve now enabled the option of using SSO across the Ayuda platform, adding an extra layer of security when logging in.
To prevent others from accessing your account, we’ve activated automatic logout for users who are idle after a certain period of time. We’ve also enabled the system data to refresh whenever a user logs in to the platform, which means no one will be missing out on any new features that were recently released.
