Real-time Tech

One example is using real-time location services in facility management and utilization applications. The technology is used to automate physical-distancing and contact-tracing policies in compliance with public health mandates. This ensures that only trusted people can enter facilities, and that the facilities themselves can likewise be trusted.

Start with a strategy & playbook

As organizations began returning their employees to the workplace, the first step was to develop a strategy and comprehensive playbook, as well as processes for communicating to employees in a time of rapid change. These elements serve as a single point of truth that helped guide the safety and security of employees while ensuring operations continued to run smoothly. Developed with input from multiple sources within an organization, these playbooks provide clear recommendations and reassurance for site leaders and all employees, and support for customers in an ever-changing environment as new information emerged and public health guidelines evolved.

Providing a single source of truth is particularly important, based on and aggregating information obtained directly from site leaders about their regional situations. These site readiness teams establish minimum requirements for all sites to include daily reporting. Also important is ongoing communication with each site lead to ensure everyone is keeping abreast of ever- changing restrictions and modifications of government COVID-19 orders.

For companies whose products and services are deemed essential to customers in sectors such as health, medical, food and government, it is critical that manufacturing and fulfillment sites continue to operate, while acknowledging that health and safety is at the forefront of employees’ minds. Organizations must anticipate very real emotions and valid concerns. It is important to frame the next normal by defining and providing reassurance about the new behaviors that will now occur in a familiar place. Comprehensive COVID-19 playbooks provide this reassuring clarity, while offering individual sites the autonomy to adjust according to specific needs in four core areas: protection, cleaning, messaging and physical distancing. Of these, physical distancing is particularly important.

The physical distancing foundation

Organizations are focusing on site-specific distancing guidance related to face-to-face meetings and the time and spacing constraints if people had to meet this way, as well as greeting practices, dining habits, and managing mail and package deliveries. These guidelines cover activities related to meeting rooms, personal offices and workstations. Site leaders should concentrate on how they can configure assembly stations and other density-management challenges. Ongoing focus areas include ensuring compliance in cube arrangements, traffic flow pattern design and management, and the use of plexiglass and other barriers to ensure separation.

With these separation guidelines in place, organizations can now automate the process of compliance. There are two key components:

• Dynamic workplace safety — Cloud-based visitor management, remote employee and visitor badge issuance, and fully touchless access solutions reduce person-to-person contact. Rule-based physical distancing management provides immediate insights and alerts to keep employees compliant with safety and sanitation requirements.

• Automated rapid response & compliance — Automated visitor compliance, contact tracing, physical distancing and hygiene behavior removes the manual and potentially laborious burden of tracking and adhering to new health and safety procedures.

Real-time location services technology is a key piece of the solution, and not new to FM. Organizations are already using this technology to know when employees and visitors enter or exit their buildings and easily understand occupancy at the building, floor or room level. They are also used to set up virtual security zones and automated alerts or alarms for violations and locate building occupants in the event of an emergency. They have been used across diverse physical environments, from the manufacturing floor to cubicles, lunchrooms and lobbies.

Now they are enabling automated physical distancing during the pandemic. To deploy them, each employee is given a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) fob using peer-to-peer capabilities. The fob beeps, providing auditory behavioral feedback when it enters the recommended six-foot physical-distancing range and remains for a specified time. This data is simultaneously sent to the cloud and the location information can be used for automated contact tracing when needed.

For stand-alone contact tracing, organizations can use a BLE beacon in the form of a badge holder that is easily added to existing ID cards. In either case, there is a full digital trail of an employee’s whereabouts and historical interactions while at work. The beacons can be issued not only for employees but also for visitors and contractors. Employers define distancing policies and alert parameters for mitigating an infection outbreak per public health guidelines, and zones can be created with geofences around high-traffic areas (breakrooms, hallways, lobbies) to minimize large congregations of people.

The solution also plays a key role when someone tests positive for COVID-19. With a click of a button, detailed reporting enables contact tracing using historical data on movement and interactions. Safety protocols are triggered based on reporting that includes a chronological list of all the times two people were in the same zone or had a distance incident. The facility can assess the risk of each employee’s exposure and minimize disruption as it rapidly responds to cases and activates isolation procedures as needed.

The same process applies to other environments, such as college campuses where students, faculty and staff returned in the Fall of 2020.

Ensuring safe campuses

One university provided an example of how contact tracing became a key pillar in resuming operations and ensuring continuity should isolated parts of its community become infected. The university installed wireless network access points (APs) throughout its campuses. Next, Bluetooth gateways were deployed that used this Wi-Fi network to listen for signals from the BLE beacons. Each person who came onto campus was required to carry a beacon inside a badge holder on a lanyard. Everyone also completed a daily symptom survey.

As they are carried around the university’s campuses, the beacons generate roughly 300,000 lines of location data per day. This information is sent to the cloud and stored in a database for real-time and historical analysis. By querying this database, the university can triangulate the location information from multiple APs to determine the relative location of everyone on campus, much like how GPS is used with cars and phones.

If an infected individual is identified, university administrators can quickly learn where the person traveled, identify those who were in contact with the person for at least 10 minutes, and notify these people so they can be isolated and monitored. The university has also used this same location information to monitor a real-time count of the number of individuals on either campus at any point in time to ensure that they are following state and local occupancy level guidelines. The university can use the solution to implement social-distancing policies. Other policy compliance challenges they automate through their real-time location-based monitoring and analytics capabilities include hand hygiene and related regulations that have been introduced as part of the world’s next normal of pandemic measures.

Other options & considerations

Location service technologies can be coupled with physical security solutions such as access control and video surveillance, adding a layer of protection for organizations striving to provide a safe, effective and resilient workplace. The integrated solutions boost security while improving emergency planning, helping to meet public health and other regulatory or policy compliance, and optimizing and refining resource allocation.

These solutions also must strike a balance between individual health, safety and personal privacy. In the case of the university’s deployment, all collected data is destroyed after the 14-day period associated with the typical viral infection period. During those 14 days, the data can only be accessed by senior IT department staff and used only for contact-tracing purposes. Also, the beacons only transmit a device Media Access Control (MAC) address that contains no personal information whatsoever. This data would be useless to anyone else except the IT department and only after translation within the database.

Today’s mobile and real-time location services technologies are increasingly valuable in a variety of work environments, but at no time have they been more integral to safety and security than during the global health crisis. They are already in broad use by Fortune 500 companies for managing building occupancy, optimizing office and facility space, asset tracking and monitoring the health of equipment. Now they also provide the foundation for safely and confidently sustaining operations at universities and other work environments during this pandemic. They can quickly scale and adapt to the dynamic requirements of a wide variety of hospitals, manufacturing facilities and enterprise organizations, and deliver real-time time monitoring and analytics capabilities that help ensure compliance with numerous safety requirements and regulations that have been introduced as part of the next normal.