Like most manufacturers, Jayco Australia has faced enormous challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it has gradually found ways to get its operations back on track – aided in part by innovative safety technology from Smart Badge.
As the country’s leading producer of recreational vehicles (RVs) and caravans, Jayco is is an iconic Australian manufacturing business. Since commencing operations in 1975, the company has built more than 200,000 RVs, all manufactured in Victoria. Still a locally-owned family business, Jayco today employs 900 staff, most of them at its manufacturing base in Dandenong South, Victoria.
When the COVID-19 pandemic reached Australia early in 2020, official measures aimed at containing its spread had a significant impact on Jayco’s operations. There was also understandable concern among staff about the risks posed by the virus, both for their safety and that of their dependants.
The situation worsened in August, as a second wave of infections surged in Victoria. With the State Government imposing Stage Four restrictions to combat the outbreak, Jayco was forced to close down its manufacturing plant for eight weeks.
“Stage Four restrictions were pretty tough,” says Gerry Ryan OAM, Jayco Australia’s owner, founder and CEO. “We had to close our Dandenong-South factory, and over the eight-week period, we have had a significant loss of production.”
Jayco has been pragmatic and proactive in the steps it has taken to enable safe operations as the crisis has gone on. A range of safety measures have been put in place, including the provision of sanitisation stations in all work areas, extra toilets, and additional personal protective equipment (PPE). Automatic, touchless doors have been installed to reduce touch points; start and break times are staggered and movement around the site is restricted; and strict cleaning regimes have been established.
In addition, Jayco has become one of the first manufacturing companies in Australia to roll out Smart Badge, an innovative new technology that manages contact tracing and social distancing between workers, and assists with maintaining capacity limits. For Ryan, the safety and wellbeing of employees is Jayco’s top priority and Smart Badge’s wearable technology is helping his company give staff and the wider community peace of mind.
“We are extremely COVID-conscious, and in our large-scale manufacturing environment, diligently managing capacity limits for anyone on site is crucial,” says Ryan. “From the factory to the front office, Smart Badge’s technology helps us do this using real-time data.”
Smart safety
The Smart Badge consists of a wearable device – available as a lanyard, wristband, clip or pin, with a hard hat version also available – that can sense if another device is within 1.5m. With everyone at a work site wearing the devices, the device will beep and vibrate if anyone strays within social distancing limits, reminding the wearers to move apart. The Smart Badge also connects wirelessly to node points positioned at key locations in the work site, providing a record of a worker’s movements and any colleagues that he/she may have been in close contact with. In the event of a worker testing positive for COVID-19, this enables rapid contact-tracing. Moreover, it allows businesses to control room or area capacity to comply with government limits.
The installation of the system at Jayco’s plant illustrates how it works in practice. Simon Finlayson, General Manager at Smart Badge, explains what the process at Jayco entailed.
“Jayco has issued all of its staff at the plant – manufacturing floor staff, office administration, security – with a wristband,” says Finlayson. “It looks a lot like a FitBit (fitness tracker), it’s IP67 waterproof and dust-proof. Those wristbands are worn each day to work by the staff, and the close contacts that they might accumulate during their normal daily duties are automatically uploaded through a node point in each of Jayco’s warehouses or manufacturing buildings.
“So it’s very straightforward. It doesn’t require staff to remember to go and tap off or download their contacts, or any manual process. It just automatically scrapes the close contacts off their device and stores them in case they need to review for a positive case being identified. It’s as simple as that. There’s no complex installation; just pop a node up in each building and issue the badges registered to each employee.”
The Smart Badge system was developed more or less from scratch over the course of this year. The company is a spin-off from Harry The Hirer, a Melbourne-based company specialising in providing equipment for the events industry (many in Australian manufacturing will know Harry the Hirer through its longstanding involvement in AMTIL’s Austech exhibition).
When COVID-19 hit at the start of 2020, it rapidly brought the entire events industry to a standstill. The team at Harry’s immediately set about exploring ways to get back into operation as quickly as possible once the pandemic was brought under control and enable events to be held safely .
“Our entire industry literally turned off overnight,” Finlayson recalls. “And very quickly a couple of us looked to find ways to help businesses in our industry get back to work sooner rather than later. At the time our focus was on social distancing, because that was all the talk from government and the media, so we started to look at ways to develop a social distancing alert that would give event managers the confidence to get people back in a space and know that they would stay apart.”
Finlayson had worked for several years at Harry The Hirer as General Manager – Productions, where his work was largely focused on developing and deploying technology for large mass gatherings, so he and his team were well qualified for the challenge ahead.
“As our R&D process went along in April and May, it started to become apparent that contact tracing – certainly in Victoria – wasn’t up to scratch,” he adds. “We were lucky enough to have in-house software developers who were able to add that functionality into our devices.
“We ran some trials in different cities, and it started to get much wider interest than we first intended, from market sectors as broad as food-processing, manufacturing, health, resources … It was pretty obvious there was real demand from businesses to take control of their own outcomes, rather than rely on a third party or a government department to respond to a positive COVID case. Businesses could do it there and then, and minimise their shutdowns.”
The Smart Badge is not a universal panacea: Jayco is still implementing a full range of measures to keep its workplace safe. Staff are still wearing masks, shifts are staggered, and social distancing and sanitisation are taking place. But as Finlayson stresses, the Smart Badge system helps minimise the fallout on the business in the event that an employee is diagnosed with COVID-19.
“If you were to get a positive case, our system allows you to select that person’s contact records,” he says. “So in Jayco’s case, you can clearly see which building that person has been in and out of. So say that person had been in building five, but not in buildings one, two, three, four, six and seven; you would only need to deep-clean building five. The contact tracing records show you that activity. And that just goes back to minimising shutdowns and productivity losses.”
Opening up for business
Jayco’s eight-week closure came to an end in late September, with the company entering its partnership with Smart Badge just as employees were returning to work.
“Seventy percent of our production goes interstate so all our customers and dealers are keen for us to re-open,” says Ryan. “The safety measures that we’ve implemented, including the roll-out of Smart Badge, will help us remain safe and socially distant, so that we can fulfill our customer orders and get people back to enjoy caravaning as quickly as possible.”
The implementation of Smart Badge coincided with Jayco’s announcement of more than 250 new job opportunities. The company plans to hire new employees over the next three months as demand for RVs continues to skyrocket – a situation likely to continue as international border restrictions see more and more Australians holidaying within its borders.
“We have had record interest and sales in caravans, camper trailers and motorhomes over the past few months,” Ryan adds. “There has been a near-65% increase in sales nationwide since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and this has opened up a range of new opportunities at our head office and factory. Our facility and production lines have never been busier. We have hundreds of new RVs to deliver to our customers and we’re accelerating our production to ensure travellers can get on the road as soon as possible.”
Finlayson remarks that while Jayco benefits as a business from the safety that Smart Badge helps to provide, it has also been welcomed by staff, providing them the reassurance that they can work more safely.
“I had an opportunity to talk to a few of the staff, and they quite appreciate the social distancing alerts, when the wristbands vibrate or beep, reminding them to step back. A few of them said to me ‘We can come to work knowing people will stay back, and I’m not going to potentially take a virus home to my family because we’re all remaining socially distanced.’”
Meanwhile, the team at Smart Badge is busy working on further development, both in terms of what its product can do, and the settings in which it can be used. The company has a large pipeline of additional functions and feature sets that it intends to add over the next few months, taking Smart Badge beyond contact tracing and social distancing. Meanwhile, the list of industries looking at adopting the technology continues to grow: the team recently installed the system in two pubs in Melbourne CBD, in readiness for restrictions to be eased and hospitality venues to be able to reopen.
“We’ve been very humbled by the interest from market sectors we’ve never really had any involvement with,” says Finlayson. “So my thinking is that anything we can do to help any business operate with confidence, we will certainly do it. We are more than happy to supply any number of market sectors and help them get that activity and confidence back into the workplace.”