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AUTOMOTIVE & ROAD TRANSPORT
Jayco Australia – Safe working with Smart Badge Like most manufacturers, Jayco Australia has faced enormous challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it has gradually found ways to get its operations back on track – an innovative safety technology from Smart Badge. As the country’s leading producer of recreational vehicles (RVs) and caravans, Jayco is is an iconic Australian manufacturing business. Since commencing operations in 1975, the company has built more than 200,000 RVs, all manufactured in Victoria. Still a locally-owned family business, Jayco today employs 900 staff, most of them at its manufacturing base in Dandenong South, Victoria. When the COVID-19 pandemic reached Australia early in 2020, official measures aimed at containing its spread had a significant impact on Jayco’s operations. There was also understandable concern among staff about the risks posed by the virus, both for their safety and that of their dependants. The situation worsened in August, as a second wave of infections surged in Victoria. With the State Government imposing Stage Four restrictions to combat the outbreak, Jayco was forced to close down its manufacturing plant for eight weeks. “Stage Four restrictions were pretty tough,” says Gerry Ryan OAM, Jayco Australia’s owner, founder and CEO. “We had to close our Dandenong-South factory, and over the eight-week period, we have had a significant loss of production.” Jayco has been pragmatic and proactive in the steps it has taken to enable safe operations as the crisis has gone on. A range of safety measures have been put in place, including the provision of sanitisation stations in all work areas, extra toilets, and additional personal protective equipment (PPE). Automatic, touchless doors have been installed to reduce touch points; start and break times are staggered and movement around the site is restricted; and strict cleaning regimes have been established. In addition, Jayco has become one of the first manufacturing companies in Australia to roll out Smart Badge, an innovative new technology that manages contact tracing and social distancing between workers, and assists with maintaining capacity limits. For Ryan, the safety and wellbeing of employees is Jayco’s top priority and Smart Badge’s wearable technology is helping his company give staff and the wider community peace of mind. Jayco Australia’s manufacturing base in Dandenong South.
AMT DEC/JAN 2021
“We are extremely COVID-conscious, and in our large-scale manufacturing environment, diligently managing capacity limits for anyone on site is crucial,” says Ryan. “From the factory to the front office, Smart Badge’s technology helps us do this using real-time data.”
Smart safety The Smart Badge consists of a wearable device – available as a lanyard, wristband, clip or pin, with a hard hat version also available – that can sense if another device is within 1.5m. With everyone at a work site wearing the devices, the device will beep and vibrate if anyone strays within social distancing limits, reminding the wearers to move apart. The Smart Badge also connects wirelessly to node points positioned at key locations in the work site, providing a record of a worker’s movements and any colleagues that he/she may have been in close contact with. In the event of a worker testing positive for COVID-19, this enables rapid contact-tracing. Moreover, it allows businesses to control room or area capacity to comply with government limits. The installation of the system at Jayco’s plant illustrates how it works in practice. Simon Finlayson, General Manager at Smart Badge, explains what the process at Jayco entailed. “Jayco has issued all of its staff at the plant – manufacturing floor staff, office administration, security – with a wristband,” says Finlayson. “It looks a lot like a FitBit (fitness tracker), it’s IP67 waterproof and dustproof. Those wristbands are worn each day to work by the staff, and the close contacts that they might accumulate during their normal daily duties are automatically uploaded through a node point in each of Jayco’s warehouses or manufacturing buildings. “So it’s very straightforward. It doesn’t require staff to remember to go and tap off or download their contacts, or any manual process. It just automatically scrapes the close contacts off their device and stores them in case they need to review for a positive case being identified. It’s as simple as that. There’s no complex installation; just pop a node up in each building and issue the badges registered to each employee.”
