Category: Integration

Staff Watch

Are your staff safe at work ?

As an employer you have a duty of care to ensure your staff are always safe. This is about to become more simple with the use of networked CCTV using  IP cameras.

Man down alarm

Important changes are happening within the work place that mean loan workers have a right to protection, up until now this involved expensive solutions that made protecting staff difficult and in some cases two people just to do one job was often the only solution.

Monitor Staff

Now however we can use modified legacy CCTV cameras or new IP cameras to to literally constantly watch your staff in lone worker situations. A simple network point in the lone worker area can now be used to connect an IP camera onto a company network to observe a working situation and with specialised intervention from companies such as Sitexorbis using mobile phone technology a solution is now available.

Staff monitoring , How does it work ?

If you have a man down , It’s a double barrelled solution.We can use the camera analytics to monitor both a fall and a motionless person and raise an alarm. We can use two way audio to speak to him if he is conscious and organise an appropriate response. If we are unable to rouse him then obviously an emergency response is required.

Allow the employee to raise the alarm

We also need to give the employee himself the ability to raise an alarm and this can be done by using his mobile phone. By using a  pre-programmed key on his mobile phone keypad he will be patched directly to a central station who can listen in and the co-ordinate a response dependent on what they can hear, ultimately someone will almost certainly be able to use the IP camera to remotely access the pictures from the scene this gives your lone worker a much better chance of survival in the case of an accident.

Summary

Health and safety is always a primary concern for all responsible employers.We can make it easy   to fulfill your responsibilities and in some cases even reduce overall costs by allowing lone working rather than having to put two men on every job.

What is integrated

What is integrated ?

Why do we use the word and what does it mean when applied to the security industry?

Well the official definition from our on line friends at wikipedia says INTEGRATED:” combining or coordinating separate elements so as to provide a harmonious, interrelated whole”.

When you read it like this it is obvious it means joining together the three main security sectors, Intruder alarms, CCTV, and Access control.

Up until recently all these 3 disciplines were kept very separate even to the point where there were CCTV companies that would not touch intruders or access control, and access companies who had never thought to install a camera above the door they were securing and so on. This has all changed now of course and now as an industry we are kind of at the half way stage.

What do we mean by this ?

Well we have billions of pounds worth of old technology out there that could best be described as analogue equipment. Separate control panels and recorders doing separate jobs. Some of this equipment has been integrated in sometimes crude ways to get systems to talk to each other but cost generally dictates that legacy equipment must be used wherever possible during an upgrade. This means as systems get partially upgraded they are never truly integrated by original design. That’s what we mean by half way there.

The time however, is fast approaching were IP security equipment is now becoming cheap enough to consider the removal of legacy equipment and installing a fully integrated IP solution that can be designed and future proofed, giving the end user a perfect security solution, that although has been possible for years, has now become affordable.

Who would want a fully integrated system ?

Well any facility manager will tell you the nightmares that are involved when you have multiple installers of different security disciplines across many different sites. Sometimes just knowing who to call out when a bleeping sound is coming from somewhere in the building can create no end of problems and most major blue chips and many larger companies crave to bring all their security under the control of one supplier.

Single supplier solutions

One point of contact and one point of invoice to deal with. This creates enormous savings, however you still have the issue with multiple sites and who administers them all.

By integrating all UK or even Worldwide sites together under one IP security solution, you get one installer with one administrator and one servicing cost and this really is utopia for any hard pressed facility manager. Further more it is infinitely cheaper, AS LONG AS YOU CHOOSE THE RIGHT COMPANY AND THE RIGHT PRODUCT FIRST TIME of course.

This is where larger companies need proper advice and tried and tested security solutions that have already established themselves as rock solid in the market place.

Is IP for everyone ?

But is an integrated security system just for the blue chips? Fortunately not. There are lots of IP solutions for the one man band and small to medium sizes organizations. Quite simply put, once your old system has reached the end of its natural life, IP is the only way forward. Eventually analogue security solutions will become a thing of the past and probably in the not to distant future.