Meadowhall Shopping Centre MOTOTRBO And Integrated Personal Tracking Software Solution Elevates Performance
CHALLENGE
Yorkshire’s largest shopping centre, Meadowhall, attracts over 25 million visitors each year and is home to 280 stores. Providing customers with a memorable shopping experience is a top priority for this major retail centre, matched equally by the need to ensure the safety of shoppers, retailers and staff in the event of an emergency.
SINGLE SOLUTION SOUGHT TO ADVANCE EFFICIENT USE OF RESOURCES
Meadowhall had previously used a manual personnel monitoring system to plot the location of its staff. This combined with an analogue two-way radio system, which had several coverage black spots, making it difficult to communicate at times.
An integrated communications solution was needed to allow the security team to track staff movements throughout the site. This would help to improve staff safety, allocate resources more effectively and aid the assessment and rewarding of good performance.
DIGITAL RADIO PROVIDES BACKBONE FOR CUSTOMISED TRACKING SYSTEM
Having already developed a personnel locating system to run on MOTOTRBO, Alsatel was approached by DCRS and they collaborated to modify the DMRAlert solution to meet Meadowhall’s specific requirements. The result was a single, integrated system that allows management to track and pinpoint the location of personnel anywhere on site, with MOTOTRBO digital two-way radios providing crystal clear voice and data communication throughout the entire centre.
In order to handle the high volume of voice and location data, the system is using Motorola’s Capacity Plus trunking technology that dramatically increases the capacity of a standard MOTOTRBO system.
Meadowhall Shopping Centre has purchased a fleet of MOTOTRBO DP3600 hand portable radios for management, security, technical and cleaning employees to use across the centre. Each radio has been fitted with a DMRAlert® IN-TRACK option board. This interacts with wireless beacons that have been installed discreetly throughout the site. Every time a radio passes a beacon, it sends a signal to the control room. The radio’s location is mapped on one of two plasma screens, which respectively show the centre’s upper and lower malls. Tracking information is recorded by the centre and stored for full traceability.
