Orange gives green light to Chubb for new lone worker protection

Orange, the mobile ‘phone business, has turned to Chubb, a leading provider of security services, to provide a simple yet highly effective solution for protecting its staff operating alone and in often remote locations by an innovative combination of mobile telecommunications and security monitoring.

Prompted by new provisions within the Health & Safety at Work Act, Orange began working with Chubb 18 months ago in devising a system that could identify, locate and assist lone workers out in the field in the event of difficulty. The company can have upwards of 200 staff working alone at any one time, performing primarily installation, service and maintenance duties to its nationwide network of masts and ancillary telecommunications equipment.

Because of the nature of Orange’s business, its engineers can find themselves in remote and potentially hostile environments at all times of the day or night. It needed to find a way of ensuring their safety and security, and worked with Chubb in finding an answer.

Chubb devised a way of integrating existing mobile technology, which all of Orange’s engineers carry, with their own security monitoring capability which allows Orange not only to meet the requirements of new legislation, but rather more importantly means it can be sure of getting to any worker in trouble within a specified time period.

Each of the mobiles carried by the lone workers has its own Unique Reference Number (URN) and a dedicated ‘phone line through to Chubb’s Security Monitoring Centre (SMC). The client agrees a specific time period (for example hourly) for each engineer to report in or be contacted. When this happens, and because their mobile has its own ID, the details are displayed at the monitoring centre and verified. Details can then be discussed regarding subsequent reporting, when the engineer has arrived/left the site, how long they expect to be there etc.

If, for whatever reason, the engineer fails to report, then this is immediately flagged and the monitoring centre calls the engineer’s mobile. If he fails to respond immediately, and then fails to respond again within a specified time period, then the situation is deemed to be an emergency, and a mobile patrol is despatched by Chubb’s Emergency Response operation. They can be on site within 25 minutes.

Orange has effectively two systems in place. For non-networked sites, its engineers call in to SMC. For networked sites, the engineers tap into the automated workforce management system that is used to control their workload and location. If anyone on this latter system fails to respond, then a call goes out to Chubb.

How Chubb responds in the event of an engineer missing a contact depends on Orange’s own escalation procedures. There could be a very good reason why an engineer is not able to get to his ‘phone at the allotted time or when the Monitoring Centre calls and this is all taken into consideration as regards when the situation becomes an ‘emergency’.

At all times Chubb keeps the customer fully informed of developments, and a precise log of all calls received and made, and the time taken to respond.

Chubb’s new lone worker protection solution was developed with Orange by Brian Bussey, Chubb’s National Control Room Manager. “The beauty of the system is its simplicity,” he says. “It is extremely easy to set up, and can be operating almost immediately. Unlike traditional ‘fixed site’ systems that relied on radio frequencies, for example, there is no hard wiring or installation costs, and the remote workers can be genuinely ‘mobile’ moving from one location to the next.”

With network coverage now something in excess of 98%, signal loss is also not an issue. “Even if there is a problem, Orange takes the responsible view that they’d rather we send out a patrol and confirm they’re OK, then just trust to luck,” Brian adds.

Additional fail-safes can be built in to the system as required, such as user passwords to ensure the call (or the response) is from the genuine user.