In the first of a three-part series, Sean Clay, vice president/general manager at Honeywell Industrial Safety EMEA, introduces its connected safety solutions approach.
It’s not easy to describe a large, multi-faceted vision such as Honeywell Industrial Safety’s connected safety solutions in one sentence, but essentially, it is a safety eco-system built around the worker which, as well as enhancing their safety, also provides and manages a great array of data for improved business management through sensor and internet-based technology.
Our new vision and its current embodiment in Honeywell Safety Suite (which I will touch on more in the next two articles), is a response to an ever changing market place, where operations around the world are becoming more complex and dangerous and more geographically dispersed.
Conversely, it is also a response to the fact that companies are managing more data than ever before. Take for example, the next generation of offshore platforms that will not have a safety office or officer onboard but rather will have a manager, based in a central location and potentially thousands of miles away, who will oversee two or three such operations remotely.
In this evolving landscape, where business conditions can change from one moment to the next and when a single failure can have crippling consequences, companies are seeking the right information at the right time to make better business decisions to improve productivity and maintain competitive advantage.
What’s more, allied to the practical challenges, the media and the rise of social media have transformed safety incidents. Incidents that, in the past, might have remained under the radar of the general public now become global news stories in a very short timeframe and therefore investment in prevention is rightly viewed as being a top priority now for brand reputation reasons as well as for practical productivity ones.
The question, therefore, is how do businesses’ gain timely access to the information they need in order to operate more effectively? One of the major challenges is that currently, in the vast majority of organisations, all health and safety elements operate in isolation and the data is kept in silos. How can organisations integrate their myriad systems – PPE, software applications and databases – to create an accurate real-time picture? How can businesses integrate their data so that it can ‘anticipate’ and prevent equipment failures that could threaten safety and interrupt the profitable functioning of the business? These are big, challenging questions which the safety industry has wrestled with for some time but we believe there is a solution, which will be the main focus of the next article of this series.
