A world leader in safety interlock systems, Fortress Interlocks has over 40 years’ experience in the industrial safety market, helping customers protect personnel and capital assets. The company designs and manufactures safety access and control systems at its HQ in Wolverhampton. These systems create safe workplaces where employees in industrial environments are safeguarded from injury and equipment is protected from damage.

Tony Baggott
Sales and Marketing Director at Fortress Interlocks

High bay warehouses are a growing area of Fortress Interlocks’ work and a recent major project involved protecting personnel in a large, multilevel automotive facility. Tony Baggott, Fortress’ Sales and Marketing Director, spoke to Warehouse & Logistics News.

Warehouse & Logistics News – First of all, Tony, what does your role as Sales & Marketing Director involve? Are you personally involved in working with customers to develop solutions? Do you have a specific team dedicated to designing and implementing high bay warehouse projects?

My role is quite wide and varied as, together with the rest of the Fortress board, initially I have P&L responsibility for the business, more specifically developing our strategic business development goals and then creating a sales and marketing plan to realise those growth targets. I am involved with collaboration efforts not only with customers but also with channel partners to deliver global plans at a local level.

We pursue an application/replication model involving our entire sales network, focused on automation safety solutions across a broad range of industrial sectors, including the ASRS space with some unique solutions aimed at protecting both personnel and productivity.

WLN – Who owns Fortress Interlocks?

Fortress is a subsidiary of Halma plc, an international group of companies that make products for hazard detection, life protection, personal and public health improvement and environmental protection. Halma has nearly 50 businesses in 23 countries and major operations in Europe, the USA and Asia. Halma is a FTSE 250 company quoted on the London Stock Exchange.

WLN – What products are in your portfolio?

We have an extensive product portfolio with a wide range of safety interlocks and control devices. This includes trapped key interlocks (mGard), safety gate switches, with and without guard locking, including IP69k devices (amGardpro & amGardS40), standard duty interlock switches with in-built control functionality (tGard), and a range of non-contact switches. All our product ranges are compliant with the latest machinery safety standards and independently approved by TUV.

WLN – In non-technical terms, how do your products work and what do they do?

Fortress products guarantee that actions and events are undertaken in a pre-determined sequence, ensuring a safe working environment. Their unique modular construction allows easy configuration and provides total electro-mechanical solutions for practically any safeguarding application.

WLN – Which industry sectors do you work with?

We work mostly in the automation safety space across a range of industry sectors and as such our customers range from power generation, steel making and automotive manufacturing to food and beverage processing, materials recycling, construction and logistics.

WLN – How much of Fortress’s business is in the UK?

Fortress operate on a global basis with facilities in Europe, USA, China and Australia but the UK is our HQ and currently accounts for 25% of our sales revenues.

WLN – Are you members of any trade bodies?

We are a member of the Machine Safety Alliance along with Festo, Pilz Automation and Troax and also Machine Safety Group part of the Gambica Trade Association.

WLN – Do you get involved in setting machine safety standards?

Yes, we have members on the machinery safety standards commitee ISO 13849 and the Safety of Machinery – Interlocking devices standards committee ISO 14119

WLN – Which of your products are particularly suited to protecting high bay warehouses?

High bay warehousing plays an increasing part in our work and amGardpro, the ultimate range of safety gate switches in the Fortress portfolio, are fully Profinet- and Profisafe–enabled, ideally suited for protecting these operations. We also offer a range of mGard trapped key solutions that are suitable for the ASRS market together with control devices from our tGard range.

WLN – What does ‘Profinet etc enabled’ mean?

Profinet (and Profisafe , its safety layer) is a communication network aimed specifically at automation. Being Profinet enabled means our devices can be part of these networks and all their control and communications are carried out over this connection. It is a bit like your laptop has an Ethernet port so it can connect to your IT network but designed specifically for automation.

WLN – What difference does this attribute make to this equipment?

By being network enabled these offer a substantial reduction in wiring and installation time as they require just one cable for power and the Ethernet cable replaces numerous wires connecting the device to the control panel, creating a simply robust ‘plug-in and play’ solution. The Profi-enabled electromechanical guard switches allow for improved diagnostic capability, which can significantly increase uptime.

WLN – Please tell us about the high bay automotive sector project you were involved in recently. Where was it located and what was the brief?

A machinery construction company, based in Nottingham, specialising in the development and manufacture of systems solutions for internal logistics, wanted to safeguard their high-bay storage retrieval systems in a large, multi-level automotive facility serviced by several deposit and retrieval cranes. The facility had to be zoned to ensure reliability, flexibility and maintainability. The design phase and install phase had to be efficient and robust. The access points could only be operated once all danger had come to rest, and not before. To reduce access time the control facilities had to be local to the access points and the safety had to achieve PLe as defined in ISO EN 13849-1, and once personnel had gained access the safety gate could not be locked behind them.

WLN – For the uninitiated, what does the term ‘PLe’ mean? Why is it significant in this instance?

Performance Level; 13849 defines five performance levels from a to e. Each level has specifications for how likely a failure to danger is to occur and whether the system can cope with and detect failures without loss of safety.

Performance Level e has the most stringent specification; your risk assessment for the application should allow you to identify what the minimum Performance Level that is required (PLr).

WLN – So what was your solution?

Our solution was our new amGardpro range of ProfiNet enabled safety gate switches. The safety gate switch utilised on this project prevents access into the hazardous area until the storage retrieval system has finished its cycle and all moving parts have come to a controlled rest. However it was decided that, to protect against inadvertent machine restart, Fortress’s unique extracted key technology would be incorporated into the design of the safety gate switch, which forces an operator to remove a safety key before the door to the guarded area can be opened. All the controls for requesting entry, restarting the machine and emergency stop were incorporated into the gate switch, further minimising installation cost and effort.

WLN – How did being Profi-enabled etc enhance the effectiveness of your solution for this specific project?

The Profinet infrastructure was already specified to control the robotic cranes, this meant that the safety interlocking dropped straight into the system with minimal additional wiring or equipment in the control cabinet, even with all of the control pushbuttons for the system and gave a common interface for the systems designers, installers and maintenance engineers. As well as all the standard Profinet debug that is available, the inbuilt web server provided even more information, allowing the installers to check the live voltage drops on cables at both ends of the aisles, on all four floors without moving.

It enabled the design, installation and commissioning stages of the project to be achieved on time and within budget. With the commissioning stage being particularly effective due to the real time diagnostics. Future maintainability will be enhanced by the robust nature of the product and software design.

WLN – What lessons did you learn from this project?

The short time scales for the project design and implementation was ideal for a network based solution we provided. The flexibility of all devices being programmable gave confidence that if modifications were required to the original design these could be achieved safely, effectively, efficiently, without costly wiring modifications and achieved on budget.

Networked systems can offer a lot of advantage over hardwired systems throughout the project lifecycle. Make sure maintenance and up time is considered as part of the project design Profinet offers facilities to support this, like automatic assignment of replacement devices and MRP (Media Redundancy Protocol).

WLN – This was a high bay operation in an automotive component factory. What other kinds of high bay operations, on what scale are your solutions suited to? Do you get involved in, for example, retail distribution centres? Do you offer a rule of thumb way for potential customers to decide whether your solutions can help them?

Fortress amGardpro range is customisable as standard allowing end user and integrators to use exactly what facilities they need for their applications, this means our solutions are used across a wide variety of automation applications from automotive, food, packaging and palletising, brick block and tile whether they are network connected or hardwired. You do not have to define your applications and systems around Fortress products; our on-line configurators create the Fortress products that fulfils the needs of the application.

WLN – Have you got any more high bay projects in the pipeline?

We work with both end users and OEM’s, as well as consultant engineers in this space and as the number of facilities is growing rapidly then so is the volume of our project activity, not only in UK but in Europe and USA as well.

WLN – Will you be exhibiting your safety solutions in the UK during 2017?

Our major exhibitions tend to be European and North American and include SPS Drives, Fab-tech, and Pack Expo but our next UK exhibition is Packaging Innovations in March at NEC, Birmingham.

WLN – Finally, where do you see this part of your business going from here?

Interesting question, as the shift to online retail is well documented and currently accounts for 14% of all sales and the current forecast is that it will grow to 17% of all retail sales by 2020, then the demand for fulfilment centres and warehouse space will also increase and so with it, the number of opportunities for Fortress safety interlock systems within the sector.

Technology will also almost certainly impact the sector, leading to product development initiatives for Fortress with additional spin off in other markets, so all in all very exciting times.

FORTRESS INTERLOCKS

Tel: 01902 349000

Email:sales@fortressinterlocks.com

www.fortressinterlocks.com

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