Safety monitoring service expanded to meet growing demand for worker protection

Blackline Safety Corporation are undergoing a major expansion of its round-the-clock safety monitoring service to cater for the increase in demand for their one-stop worker-safety monitoring service. They will be adding to their team of highly-trained monitoring technicians at their the Blackline Safety Operations Centre (SOC)  in North America, while opening a new SOC in France in the coming months.

Sherrie Sawkey, Blackline Safety Director of Global Safety Operations, stated “The more the world becomes a connected place, the more businesses are looking for a seamless, end-to-end consolidation of employee safety services,” 

Blackline anticipate a 100% increase in the number of connected devices monitored thanks to the expansion. The European and North American markets for lone worker protection is expected to exceed US$260 million this year.

Sawkey continued “Employers want to deal with one vendor for hardware, software and monitoring because it leaves less room for error when every second counts, and that’s where we have a distinct advantage,” she explained. “As a result, we’re looking to expand the number of our monitoring agents by up to 50 per cent.”

Blackline’s North American SOC opened in 2015 to support safety monitoring via Blackline connected devices. Its experienced and highly trained personnel are capable of managing all manner of gas and lone worker incidents, from start to finish, while adhering to the individual safety protocols of each customer and liaising with local first-responders when required. The SOC team has expanded from a pair of agents back in 2015, to 20 in 2022, who handle up to 1,000 alerts on a daily basis from over 37,000 connected wearable and fixed monitors.

In 2021, having transitioned its command centre to a remote workforce because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Blackline’s SOC dealt with a record 250,000 alerts over the year, most of them were related to high gas levels or missed check-ins. Just 20 of those alerts resulted in a call to the local emergency services via 9-1-1, with Blackline agents using the company’s advanced technology to direct first responders to the exact location of the personnel involved.

Blackline’s cloud-based technology features GPS-enabled safety sensors and devices that leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) to connect workers to live monitoring. The platform provides high-performance emergency response, evacuation management capabilities and contract tracing. It connects workers with software that pinpoints their location, enables back-and-forth information sharing and collects vital data, making it possible to detect the exact location of a gas leak or determine how often workers are travelling through hazardous areas. Blackline’s wearables come in two rugged versions, one connected through a cellular network and another via satellite.