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Mars Wrigley, the world’s leading manufacturer of chocolate, chewing gum, mints and fruity confections, has deployed Ascom enterprise communication solutions at five of its French facilities. Each solution is an advanced management tool that integrates and automates all technical and personal alarms.
Already present at one of the sites with a DECT-based solution, Ascom (together with Cisco telephony) has been tasked with renewing the mobility infrastructure and providing unified management solutions to improve enterprise processes. One particularity to take into account is that Mars Wrigley has its own standards within each of its agro-food factories, which are independent and interconnected despite the dedicated activities at each site. Ascom has used its solutions platform to provide more fluid, optimized management of production lines and mobile workers.
At present, the Ascom platform is operational at five sites in France: Haguenau, Steinbourg, Saint Denis de l’Hôtel, Châteaudun and Ernolsheim. The solution is intelligent in that it integrates and prioritizes all technical and personal alerts into a single handheld device carried by mobile workers. Such mobile connectivity enables fast and accurate andresponsiveness, which in turn supports better cost management and manufacturing flexibility.
Worker protection is our priority. At each of our sites, the Ascom platform lets us better protect isolated workers.
“When an employee arrives at the workplace, he or she is equipped with an Ascom handset with an assigned telephone number. Depending on the task to be performed, Ascom’s platform is able to identify each mobile device (by their presence or not in their charging rack, their type of station) and lets each user signal him/herself as ‘present and active’ within predefined user groups. Instantly, the Ascom platform sends notifications to the device of all the alarms and alerts assigned to its workstation”, explains Jean Froehlicher, Computer Methods and Maintenance Technician at Mars Wrigley Confectionery.
Continues Froehlicher: “Worker protection is our priority. At each of our sites, the Ascom platform lets us better protect isolated workers. Indeed, it happens that some of our technicians or production worker find themselves alone in utility tunnels or manufacturing areas as part of maintenance work or technical monitoring. If needed, the geo-location function on their mobile devices enables very rapid rescue team interventions. The flexibility and extreme adaptability of the Ascom solution platform, coupled with the Ascom IP-DECT solution, gives us day-to-day, real-time management of all types of alarms: technical, process machine, PTI/DATI. Finally, Ascom has been able to adapt to our ‘sensitive’ environment, which especially requires the use of many ATEX mobile devices on our sites.”
Satisifed with the Ascom solutions deployed at the factories, Mars Wrigley are considering adding email functionality as a way of enriching notifications to technicians. That way, when becoming aware of a notification, an employee can know its context and degree of technical compexity and can anticipate the needed intervention.
