LONE WORKER PROTECTION
ALARM BELLS
Keeping track of 250 workers across a large industrial plant is no easy feat. That’s why glass manufacturer, O-I, turned to ANT Telecom for assistance at its Holzminden plant in Germany.
International glass manufacturer, O-I, operates out of 77 plants in 21 countries throughout the world. It employs over 22,000 people and has an annual turnover of $7 billion. In its Holzminden plant in Germany O-I has two furnaces and five production lines where it produces several million glass items a year to be distributed to customers across Europe. The company has more than 250 workers in the plant on a rota system and it operates 24/7.
O-I recently enlisted the help of communication specialist ANT Telecom to review and revise its lone worker procedures at the plant.
STARTING POINT The Holzminden is a mid-sized plant
with the workforce working across the entire site rather than only in specific areas. In general, mobile reception on site was at an acceptable level and many employees could rely on mobile phones to fulfil their daily tasks, except in the basement areas where mobile reception was lacking.
A static lone worker system was available in a specific area of the Holzminden site; however, this relied on employees pressing a button every 15 minutes to confirm that
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they were safe. In the event there was no response, an alarm would be triggered within the company’s process management system and displayed in the control room.
In case the control room was not manned, the alarms were also shown in various places around the plant, where a basic alarm panel with five lights indicated which type of alarm had been activated. A similar process was followed with O-I’s machine fault and fire alarm systems.
LIMITATIONS In the early stages of ANT’s consultancy with O-I, the alarm distribution and response process were reviewed, which highlighted a number of inefficiencies. At times when the control room was unmanned, it could take a significant amount of time before an alarm was detected by other employees.
In addition, with 250 different alarms fed into the system, a flashing alarm light only gave a basic indication of what the alarm was for. This led to a complex, multi-stage approach whereby the person reacting to the alarm had to notify the shift coordinator, who in turn had to notify a skilled engineer.
There were severe delays caused by the existing alarm distribution and response process in responding to and resolving a problem with a machine or attending to an employee in trouble, resulting in lost production time, potential material wastage and additional health risks for the lone worker.
There were also some employees who could be working in hazardous areas, which were infrequently patrolled by other staff. Employees working in a part of the plant with no GSM coverage struggled to raise any alarms too and would therefore have to rely on colleagues raising an alert when they noticed they were missing. It could be hard to identify where a missing worker might be found, carrying serious health implications in the case of any accidents.
Another very specific process that ANT identified for improvement was the out of hours emergency call out. In case of an alarm occurring out of hours the shift coordinator had to notify the control room to activate an out of hours duty call list. This meant calling a number of people to alert them to come to site to deal with the alarm (e.g. a furnace fire or serious machine fault).
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