A Salvo of safety
May 1st 2011 With a long safety interlocking pedigree, in recent years Castell has made a name for
itself in the loading bay. Simon Duddy caught up with the company's management to
hear how this was achieved.
Castell is an old company that was formed almost 90 years
ago in the wake of the electrification of London to
provide safety solutions, but it is always on the lookout
for new opportunities.
This led the company six years ago to diversify into loading
bay safety, where the interlock system the company is known for
is used to prevent drive-offs. The Salvo system works by linking
the articulated trailer to the loading bay door during the loading
procedure. The Salvo Susie lock is fitted to the emergency air
brake line coupling when the trailer has been reversed into
position at the loading bay. After successful fitment, a uniquelycoded
key is released from the Salvo, locking the unit firmly onto
the coupling.
The key can only be released once the Salvo has been fitted to
the brake coupling. The key is then taken to the corresponding
loading bay and used to switch the power on to the door.
The product is simple to use and sales director David Hughes
feels this has stood the company in good stead.
"If a safety system is too complicated there is a large incentive
to defeat it," he says. "Whereas if you make something simple to
use and operate as well as robust, staff on the ground are
encouraged to work with the system."
The company has a long track record of providing safety
interlocking systems for environments as diverse as nuclear
power stations and machine guarding in factories, but the
loading bay was a different challenge, as Jason Reed, UK sales
manager for the Salvo product, explains.
"When we look at loading bays, they can lack regular
maintenance regimes.Maybe there is a slightly different
mentality to the loading bay than there would be to a piece of
machinery, but we look at it in the same way. At the end of the
day, we produce safety products and we are focused on
protecting staff from injury and products from damage."
Castell engineers are NEBOSH (National Examination Board in
Occupational Safety and Health) trained. This provides
vocationally-related qualifications designed to meet the health,
safety, environmental and risk management needs of places of work.
Reed adds that the loading bay market has changed
considerably over the last 12-18 months, with companies now
asking for problems to be engineered away if possible, whereas
before companies tended to request a specification that would
meet HSE requirements. Indeed, the HSE recommends safety
interlocks as one way of combatting drive-aways (p.92
http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/priced/hsg76.pdf).
Efficiency is a key point for Castell, as well as safety. The
company acknowledges that while the safest loading bay is one
that is never used, in reality safety products cannot add undue
burden to operations.
"The company's philosophy is 'fast, safe access'," says Hughes.
"We are expert in engineering a solution without a huge
overhead in operations, maintenance and equipment to ensure
workers are not in danger."
Castell is seeing increased demand for its products in the
loading bay, with Salvo installed in around 3,000 loading bays in
the UK and Ireland. The company puts this down in part to a
greater awareness among senior management that they could
personally be held responsible for deaths under new corporate
manslaughter legislation. It is also in part due to simple
cost/benefit analysis.
So where next for Castell and Salvo? For one, the versatile
product will continue to expand into new areas. For example it is
also used to prevent drive-offs in the tanker loading environment,
and the company is also targeting international markets.
Looking longer term, Castell is exploring adding greater
intelligence to the system, as Hughes explains.
"There's a range of opportunities in terms of where to go next.
We're actively looking at being able to capture information, for
example.We're having conversations with customers on
efficiency, so it would seem a logical step to see how efficient
loading bays are. If you can get efficiency up to 80% from 40%
you could avoid capital cost and
have smaller warehouses." More articles from Castell Safety International Ltd: | 
