SOLUTIONS COMMUNICATIONS By Chris Clarke
Leave the two-way radio in the past Modern team communication technologies boost productivity and safety
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lant environments present many challenges for person-to-person and group communication. Plants are noisy and entail safety concerns. Workers are spread out and lack new technology — or any technology — for effective team communication. Current communication practices in plants can make it cumbersome, time consuming and risky to give direction, ask a question or simply have a necessary conversation to accomplish the task at hand.
Communication method challenges
In the 1980s and 1990s, many plants adopted the technology of the age, the two-way radio, for communication. It is still in use today. Although an effective solution three or four decades ago, twoway radios are not the most effective or efficient communication tools. Conversations take anywhere from two to five times as long as they need to due to the one-at-a-time communication structure. Each person in a conversation has to push a button to talk and to respond, the others have to wait for their turn to speak. This makes back and forth conversation for asking questions or confirming understanding stilted and halting. It’s not a natural way to talk. Two-way radios also require hands-on use, and a single radio may not be sufficient for some personnel. For example, some plant managers have to carry multiple radios to communicate with various teams.
Figure 1: Industrialgrade Bluetooth provides ranges up to one mile. Courtesy: Sena Technologies
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• March 2021
PLANT ENGINEERING
Some plants have resorted to using employees’ personal or company-provided cellular phones for communication. This approach relies on consumer technology, which is fragile without the correct protective cases and undependable in areas where the signal is weak or because of batteries that deplete quickly. It also requires hands-on use. Finally, mobile phones are expensive to provide to all personnel. Yet other plants eschew communication technology altogether and rely on face-to-face communication. This approach requires employees to go find the person they need to speak with. In noisy environments, that can lead to shouting. With COVID-19 operating regulations in effect, the no-tech communication method is not only inefficient, it is also dangerous. Even facilities that aren’t categorized as “smart” update their technology use in the form of new machines, contemporary software and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) integration. Now is the perfect time to evaluate your technology and communication practices and consider how to improve.
Enter: wireless intercom
Communication between people and among teams in plants should be easy, efficient, safe and improve productivity. Fortunately, there are practical and affordable communication technology options for plants: Bluetooth intercom and Mesh Intercom. Both systems offer fast, reliable and robust communication tools that can be easily implemented, often without even involving information technology (IT) departments. Bluetooth intercom. When you hear the word “Bluetooth,” images of wireless mice for laptops or earbuds for smartphones may come to mind. But industrial-grade Bluetooth intercom is much more than those consumer-use accessories. Bluetooth operates with a variety of profiles for different purposes, such as pairing wireless devices. Bluetooth intercom uses a specific profile to connect headsets together for voice communication. Setting up in-plant Bluetooth intercom is as simple as pairing team devices to each other, typically limited www.plantengineering.com
