3 min
Safety has become a top priority for most organizations today, along with the importance of having an effective strategy in place to combat and manage emergencies and risks. With this in mind, modern solutions have been developed to ensure organizations are fully equipped to meet their legal and safety obligations concerning their onsite employees, visitors, and contractors.
Why is Muster Reporting Needed?
Increased on-site accountability is essential for a workplace with a high number of employees, and regular visitors and contractors entering their organization. In the event of a fire or emergency, having increased on-site accountability allows emergency response services to easily and quickly identify all persons in a building, whether they are staff or a visitor. This ensures that the rescue planning and management of the emergency is optimized at a high level, further ensuring the safety of all persons.
Explaining the intricacies of the feature, Business Development Manager for acre security, Michael Byrden explains that “once a roll call report has been generated, a list of all the users present in the area group selected will be displayed in the lower window of the roll call screen”.
“Initially, all of these users will be given a status of 'Missing.' If muster readers are defined, the users will change status to 'Safe' as they present their user tokens to the reader to confirm that they are now in a defined muster area of the site,” he concludes.
How Reports are Displayed?
As personnel swipes safe at designated muster points, a missing list report is then made available on intelligent mobile devices which automatically update, offering a unique insight into the various stages of evacuation. The extensive reporting suite assists emergency services to pinpoint the last known location of missing persons or unaccounted individuals. This dramatically improves the outcome of rescue operations.
“Determining where employees are located can be critical for knowing whether they are in danger”, says Michael. “That’s why a key security emergency is using access control systems for reporting employees’ locations, also used mustering.”
What are the Key Benefits of Muster Reporting?
- Real-time on-site accountability.
- Optimized rescue planning.
- Real-time visibility for Emergency Response Teams.
- Regulatory compliance.
- Optimum on-site security.
- Robust reporting functionality.
- Availability of ‘last-known-location’
- Reaffirms your organization's commitment to Health & Safety standards.
Critically, it is essential to note that muster reports can only be successfully used if all users follow the system's conventions. That is, all users must swipe in and out of all controlled areas.
Moreover, if any person is still missing following the conduction of a muster report, cameras integrated into the access control system can be used to scan the building’s interior and exterior while simultaneously calling the missing person’s listed contact number by clicking on this information on the dashboard of the muster report.
The Implementation Process
Following discussions with OLS’s Founder and CEO Ollie Law, the common requirements for OLS’ clients when implementing muster reporting solutions are “health and safety compliance, process management, ease of access to a report, self-accounting for users for a swifter process and reduced mustering time after an evacuation”. The time it takes to implement this solution is all dependent upon a site survey, but depending on the client’s requirements, it can take as little as a day.
The beginning steps to implementing this solution with OLS involve working with end-users to define the risk assessment to ensure current measures are in place to determine the requirements of the new system. With regard to training and support options that are available upon implementation, the OLS team “promises to provide training and support for the end-user during the implementation of the system with a dedicated project manager assigned to the client”.
