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Gillett Environmental or Lytham St Annes Skip Hire as they're known locally was setup in the 1980s by Andy Gillett (Snr).
By the early 2000’s, Andy Snr had brought his sons onboard and eventually handed the reins to his sons, Joe and Andy (jnr), to continue his legacy.
It’s a true family business and at the heart of what they do is their people. And operating in a sector such as waste that has high risks when it comes to people plant safety, they want to protect their staff in the best way they can.
Joe Gillett, Managing Director, commented:
“Health and safety of our staff is paramount, and we take a proactive approach to ensure everyone is as safe as possible. Training is good, but human nature is people don’t always do the things they are shown or advised to do (i.e., stay in marked walkways). We’re always looking for new things to take our safety to the next level and wanted to introduce proximity warning technology for an instant live prompt, with the goal of making people think and act differently.”
Gillett chose SiteZone Safety to help manage their plant pedestrian risks with their proximity warning systems across their fleet of vehicles including excavators, telehandlers, loading shovels, and forklift trucks.
Joe continued,
“As well as SiteZone’s experience in this sector, one of the reasons we chose them was the 3-year tag battery life. Not having to recharge the tags reduces the management and makes it much easier for us.”
Gillett chose SiteZone’s patent pending SmartBubble option for their excavators, telehandlers, and loading shovel. By installing SmartBubble, the proximity warning system knows when the machine is in a safe state, either by monitoring when the deadmans handle is engaged or a radar to detect if the machine is stationary, and then automatically reduces the zone to a second predefined smaller size. This allows for authorised approaches without setting off the proximity alarm.
Joe added,
“I’ve seen the SmartBubble working onsite. It helps with the process, improving eye contact between the pedestrian and line of sight with the driver. Ultimately this safe behaviour is what we want from people working on our site and this system naturally conditions staff to be more aware when working around moving plant. The feedback from site has been positive since introducing SiteZone. We initially thought there may be some pushback, but the team recognise the value and have picked up the system quickly. They also appreciate that we’re investing in their safety and care. SiteZone training is incorporated into inductions using their training video and all visitors to site get written instructions as well as a tag whilst on site.”
The management team at Gillett are also benefiting from SiteZone’s new PowerBI data platform. The system logs all interactions between people and plant and brings it together in an easy-to-use dashboard built in Microsoft PowerBI. They can see which machines are getting most zone breaches, which tag numbers, where on site, and on which day. They can drill down into a granular level to give them real tangible information to act on.
Joe concluded,
“Now that the system has been in for nearly a year we can start to see if there are improvements. We’re also looking to put in a staff incentive for people who have less zone breaches. We haven’t put this system in to tick a box, we want to see the behaviours of our staff change when working around moving vehicles.”
Gary Escott, Managing Director at SiteZone commented,
“Working with Gillett on the SiteZone implementation has been a real pleasure. We know that being struck by a moving vehicle remains the second most common cause of fatal injuries (23 people in 2021-2022). By working with people like Andy and Joe at Gillett Environmental we hope to reduce this number. And the implementation and behaviours are just as important as the technology used for protecting against plant pedestrian collisions. Since the machine installation, Gillett have recently added limiting to their site. We developed limiting particularly for the waste sector. The way it works is it creates a ‘null zone’ where people don’t get detected by the proximity warning system. This is used in areas such as segregated walkways, picking lines, or cabins around the site and means you only get alarms when there is a true risk.”