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When a plant decides to get a vehicle entry control system
A manufacturing plant rarely buys a system just for the sake of having one. The decision is usually triggered by one of four events:
- a customer audit, in which a customer from the automotive or food industry asks about access control and inductions for contractors, and the answer “we keep a notebook” doesn’t pass,
- an incident involving an outside driver, such as an accident, damage to property or theft, after which someone asks who let them in and whether they had an induction,
- a queue at the gate that starts blocking the internal roads and is now getting in the way of production as well,
- a change in traffic volume: a new line, a new customer, twice as many deliveries, and a gatehouse that can no longer keep up with the same number of staff.
Where to start the rollout in a manufacturing plant
Manufacturing plants almost never deploy the whole of TraxSystem at once. This is the order that most often works for them.
First comes the entry log. Vehicle entry control answers the audit question and works from day one, even without hardware, with manual registration. This stage builds the data that everything else rests on.
Next come inductions. Health and safety on a terminal takes a duty nobody enjoys off your staff and closes the most common audit finding. It also provides the evacuation list, which the same auditor usually asks about.
The third stage is gate automation. Number plate recognition makes sense once traffic is already being recorded and you can see which vehicles come back often enough to be worth letting through without an operator.
Delivery bookings and people access control come last. Delivery bookings come in when the plant is ready to take the organisational decision that a delivery without a booking is handled after the booked ones. Access control and time and attendance usually follow as a separate project, often with a different sponsor on the customer’s side.
Service contractors and subcontractors on the plant site
An engineer from a service company arrives for three days, goes into the production hall, works on a machine and leaves. They usually have no card, because nobody wants to issue one for three days, so someone lets them in by hand, and in an evacuation they are not on any list.
In TraxSystem, a contractor is an organisation in a lookup list, its staff are put on a work list with start and end dates, and their card comes from a separate pool and goes back when the work is finished. The permission has a date range, so it expires by itself. Exit always works, even after expiry: a person who is on site must have a way out.
The list of people is pasted from an email or loaded from a spreadsheet, so issuing cards to a three-person crew takes as long as writing them into a notebook, except that in an evacuation those three people are on the list. The whole process is described on the contractor staff page.
Speed measurement, car parks and the vehicle locator on the plant site
In a manufacturing plant, people walk along the internal roads, and that turns speed measurement from a matter of good order into a matter of workplace safety. In TraxSystem, the same area covers car park occupancy and a locator that shows where a particular vehicle is parked and, on a large site, saves driving round looking for it every day.
What TraxSystem won’t solve in a manufacturing plant
TraxSystem won’t increase the throughput of the gate or the docks. It will show where the bottleneck is and at what time of day, but the bottleneck itself will stay where it was. Nor will it enforce supplier punctuality, but it will give you material for the commercial conversation: who didn’t turn up and how often.
The system won’t block entry for a driver without a valid induction. The operator sees a warning, and the decision to let them in belongs to a person and will stay that way.
Nor will software replace an organisational decision. Delivery bookings work only once the plant has decided that a vehicle without a booking waits. Without that rule the calendar is just a nicer-looking spreadsheet, and that is the most common reason for disappointment with an implementation.
Related
Vehicle entry controlHealth and safety and evacuationAccess controlOn-site trafficCase studies
Further reading: Where to start at a manufacturing plant · How many people are on site? · A driver without an induction: whose risk?