Forklifts & Components
Safety first with smart lock
The streetcar manufacturer Bombardier Austria secures forklifts and warehouse technology with access control from Mobile Easykey: key handovers in the conventional sense are now a thing of the past and security has also been improved.streetcars are built in Vienna for the whole world. Security is right at the top of the agenda - not only for the finished product, but also for day-to-day work. The order situation is good: 70 to 100 complete light rail vehicles with low-floor technology leave the plant in Vienna every year. 80 percent of production is exported to all continents. Some of the almost 500 employees work in two shifts to cope with demand. Vehicles are currently being manufactured for projects in Austria, Switzerland, Australia and Great Britain. The Viennese engineers also carry out design services for the global Bombardier Group.
The importance of occupational safety at Bombardier becomes clear as soon as you enter the company premises. On a pillar next to the entrance, the accident-free days at the plant are shown on a display for every visitor and employee. Andreas Ertler, Director Production Control & Technical Services (responsible for work preparation, production planning and control and intralogistics), starts a tour of the plant with a safety briefing and equipping visitors with helmets and safety shoes. In the assembly hall, there are displays with motifs from Bombardier's current global safety campaign: "Safety - No Ex-ceptions!". The company informs employees about safety standards and risks in their daily work. Sometimes drastic motifs illustrate the possible consequences of non-compliance with safety instructions. For example, next to the photo of a man who had a hand amputated, it reads: "I never left the safety flap of the cutting machine open - except for that one afternoon when I had so much to do."
"Our drivers have become more careful. We have Mobile Easykey to thank for that."Andreas Ertler, Bombardier
Always at the center: occupational safety
For Andreas Ertler, improving occupational safety is part of his daily business. Procedures are constantly being improved, measures and compliance with them reviewed and new standards developed. This also applies to the industrial trucks available at the site - forklifts, heavy-duty forklifts, pallet trucks and warehouse equipment. In 2013, Bombardier began retrofitting Mobile Easykey to newer equipment. In addition, the more than 10-year-old forklift fleet was successively renewed and ordered directly with Mobile Easykey access control. Linde is the main supplier of industrial trucks and also recommended the fleet management system at the time.
Bombardier wanted to prevent unauthorized use of the machines on the one hand and end the procedure of handing over keys at least twice a day on the other. Employee acceptance of Mobile Easykey was high from day one, because from then on there were no more complaints about keys not being removed or handed in. Since then, every colleague has had a personal transponder and the Mobile Easykey software stores who is authorized to operate each device. Unauthorized use is therefore just as impossible as forgetting a key. In addition, each equipped device is switched off after a predefined time, the current access authorization expires and an operator must log in again.
Recurring training courses for employees are also managed via the Mobile Easykey software so that they are not forgotten. These are stored with an alarm and the responsible person is reminded by e-mail, for example.
Andreas Ertler: "The exclusion of unauthorized use is a requirement of the Employee Protection Act and the Work Equipment Ordinance and is clearly regulated in Austrian legislation. For seamless state-of-the-art compliance, smart lock came into play, the cost-effective access control system using a chip from Mobile Easykey, which simply replaces the existing ignition lock. "The large modules from Mobile Easykey were simply too big for the pallet trucks and, above all, the investment was not in proportion to the acquisition costs," says Ertler.
No need to collect the keys
smart lock has now been retrofitted to all pallet trucks and high-lift trucks. Here, too, it is no longer necessary to collect and issue keys. The system also takes account of a special feature at Bombardier: users must also be authorized to operate tiller trucks and must undergo training to do so. As with the "large" Mobile Easykey modules, the authorizations are also stored in the "small" smart lock. Retrofitting with smart lock is almost complete. And in future, Bombardier will order all forklift trucks and warehouse equipment ex works with Mobile Easykey.
Andreas Ertler sees more than just the exclusion of unauthorized use as a success: "We have been using the crash+ module for the forklifts since 2013. Since then, we have had two harmless alarms. Our drivers have become a lot more careful. We have Mobile Easykey to thank for that in particular."
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