Pizza boxes, soda cans, half eaten snack bars and stained furniture is what we expect to see when entering a 24X7X365.25 plant control room.  The operators, usually with a scowl face and food stained clothing, most times have their head in their hands anticipating crew change. This dimly lit environment is also conducive to errors due to operators nodding off, that is until the next alarm wakes them from their control room trance.

I witnessed such a difference while touring a client’s plant in LA (Louisiana that is!!).  Our guide, we will call him Craig, showed us a state of the art control room that they  just completed.  What a set-up! The room was well lit, had REALLY NICE ergonomic work chairs, a multitude of high resolution monitors in a well organized, simple and spacious work area.  Three strategically placed wall mounted 60” (I believe) LED monitors gave everyone an “at a glance dashboard” of plant operations. 

The operators were all comfortably monitoring their section of the plant with smiles on their faces.  It was obvious that they were enjoying themselves.  Hey, this is not right, you guys ARE working but it appears that you’re having way too much fun.  While I observed this interesting phenomenon I soon realized why.  They had a new addition to the control room, a brand new elliptical workout machine.  Every few minutes another operator would hop on the new toy for their turn.  As they continued to rotate every few minutes they were talking about how much weight they planned to lose, how they were going to increase their time on the machine or challenging their colleagues to an elliptical contest.   The iconic beauty of this scenario is that the machine was positioned so the operators could see their workstations.  They were able to monitor their stations while burning the calories.   Craig told us that not only were the operators enjoying their work more, they were also more productive and kept the area much cleaner. 

This smart client combined Automate-Zen with wellness!  An innovative concept that is sure to take off.   

Be Well!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 30th, 2011 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Client Success Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.