Rook to Locker — Cross-Team Collaboration Wins the Last-Mile Match

Building, growing, and scaling your OOH delivery network is much like a game of chess. 

In chess, you must scan across the board to try and read your opponent’s next move and decide where to place your pawn. In OOH delivery network planning, you must scan your existing network, see how it performs, and look for the perfect spot for your next OOH point.

And much like in a game of chess, your successful next OOH location is carefully crafted, iteration after iteration. Checkmate takes careful preparation, just as a successful OOH network takes a team effort to link together data points into shared insights that your team can then act on as one.

In chess, one hand moves the pieces. In OOH network planning, many hands move many pieces — and often to conflicting results.

Silos hurt your network planning

In a typical scenario, there is a long thread of Excel comments or emails where different teams argue in favor or against a location, data analysts share network performance, and network managers elaborate on the rationale for a partnership with a location provider. 

Add to that different tools for different parts of planning and communication and it becomes a lengthy process without a same-time, comprehensive look of the network.

More often than not, this leads to double work, a segmented view of the network, and incomplete information. And it keeps the expertise of all your teams locked.

As a result, vital decisions are not only delayed but key information is easily lost. And given the competition, such delays may lead to a loss of a potentially prime location or an oversight of an existing underperforming location. 

The less collaboration is enabled, the higher the chances of an ineffective decision.

How cross-team collaboration gets you to checkmate

As OOH gets more popular, more players are entering the market. National postal operators, e-commerce businesses, and delivery companies are all looking for ways to unlock new revenue channels and delight customers through OOH delivery options. This requires acting fast — without distractions and inefficiencies in the process.

By enabling your team to work together in real time and bring their expertise to a joint table, you set them up for success. You equip everyone on the team with real-time insights at the same time, cutting the time needed to make critical business decisions, ensuring no crucial piece of information is lost, and keeping track of your previous choices as know-how for future planning. 

Gather the entire team around a single planning spot

One of the central pieces of network planning is the network modeling work. Without one central place for collaboration, everyone on the team would typically need to have their own map with their own set of pins about the existing and future locations. 

To get a full view of all these maps at the same time, you would need to stack them one over the other, which takes hours of copy-pasting, going back and forth across tools, and only then reaching a decision.

By enabling collaboration at one central location, you help your teams work together on a single map, giving all of them the same information, a unified view of the network, and a look into all existing and potential OOH locations with accompanying information like population data, network coverage, while assessing just how impactful potential locations are. 

Help teams talk where they work

Sharing ideas and concerns matters as much as network modeling. Teams that have to use one tool for the actual planning and then switch to emails and other apps to share their ideas get bogged down in endless threads and comments. 

Not only are they slowed down in making decisions, but also burdened by having to keep track of all and any feedback that has come their way — in a place where the actual work is not happening.

On the other hand, if you enable your team to talk to each other at the same place of their actual work, you speed up the process, ensure no information is lost, and make it easier to spot patterns, come up with joint ideas, and as a result have full confidence into the decisions you are going to make.

Turn team expertise into a repeatable strategy

Managing OOH networks is a continuous effort — locations and routes that perform today may easily underperform tomorrow. So you need to be on a continuous lookout for how each of your OOH points is performing. 

And the issue with a siloed approach is that one hour of manual work will still be an hour of work in the future, just costlier.

If you need to re-visit the discussions your team had in the past about a location, you would still need to dig through old spreadsheets, emails, and resolved comments to find out why you’ve made a decision before. This means that what slowed down your team before is slowing it down again.

Conversely, suppose you enable your team to turn all the current discussions into future playbooks. 

In that case, you are saving their time, the rationale, and valuable insights into your strategy for future use. These then work as historical information your entire team can easily lean on when calling the shots on the next location.

We have something exciting coming up that will bring all your teams together around a central hub, let them share ideas, and make better decisions — stay tuned!