Alerting and informing a commuter campus population through hurricane season.
The Mosaic Company is a world leader in potash and phosphates production that focuses on providing top-quality fertilizers to agricultural markets around the globe. The enterprise, headquartered in Minnesota and included in the Fortune 500, reaches roughly 40 different countries with A-plus products. Mosaic’s widespread success is due in part to its ongoing dedication to offering value and agronomic expertise to its customers, while maintaining a safe workplace for its employees.
The goal of protecting laborers from injuries is especially important for Mosaic. In order to gather the materials needed to make its top-notch products, the company uses heavy equipment for mining operations. Communication is crucial for effectively responding to emergency situations, not to mention maintaining the efficient performance of critical operations.
However, the challenges that come with Mosaic’s line of business combined with some unique logistical difficulties rendered its existing methods of communication ineffective. Recognizing the importance of a reliable way of enhancing communication between the management and the staff, the company decided it needed to improve upon its communications platform
Challenge: Connecting Employees Across 100 Square Miles and Communications Dead Zones
With three different work sites in central Florida, including one split across four counties, guaranteeing effective communication was a real quagmire for Mosaic. The company’s properties in the Southern state cover more than 100 square miles, presenting challenges of scale, in addition to difficulties figuring out who to call in case of an emergency. The importance of implementing an effective critical communication service for this vast industrial territory is highlighted by the fact that Mosaic’s emergency response team leader placed communications as a top priority on its list of action items for two years.
To address the team’s troubles, Mosaic tried a plethora of different communication methods, from radio transmissions to walkie-talkies, to establish the lines of correspondence needed to keep workers safe and ensure optimum productivity, but found that the job done. That is when the company set out in search of an alternative to the failed technologies it had tried in the past and came upon Omnilert.
Solution: A Reliable and Effective Critical Mass Communications System
After finding Omnilert, Mosaic collaborated with the mass communications provider to develop a custom strategy to address the unique difficulties that were cropping up at three of its Florida facilities. By sitting down together and participating in an engaging mutual exchange of ideas, the two companies were able to work out a tailored approach to address the specific problems confronting Mosaic.
Beyond its professional consulting services, Omnilert provided the fertilizer producer with a critical mass communication solution of just the right size to meet its needs. This network functioned through multiple channels, including text, email, and voicemail, to ensure vital information could be sent to those who needed it quickly, easily, and effectively. Moreover, the new solution allowed Mosaic to send crucial transmissions selectively, distributing them only to the individuals who needed to receive them based on an array of pre-determined scenarios.
Results: Dependable Communications for a Variety of Use Cases
With a new critical communications solution in place, along with a strategy developed jointly with Omnilert, Mosaic quickly found it had made the right decision. Unlike the previous solutions tried by Mosaic, Omnilert’s service was able to provide dependable communications in a variety of scenarios from the get-go—even in cases when cell phones had only half a bar of service or employees were located 25 feet below grade. Not only did the new solution perform well right off the bat, but it did so at a lower cost than any of the technologies previously implemented by the fertilizer company, due in part to its software as a service (SaaS) format.
Various users at Mosaic were especially pleased with the ease and speed with which they could send two-way messages to locations throughout the enterprise’s vast central Florida property. In fact, the company’s on-site production manager was absolutely ecstatic with the results he could achieve with Omnilert. In contrast to Mosaic’s old approach to communications, which entailed the use of an immense telephone console with about a core of push buttons to make dozens of phone calls that often fell on deaf ears, the new solution allowed the production manager to use pre-configured templates to easily disseminate information to certain employees for specific scenarios.
Mosaic’s production manager wasn’t just jazzed about having an easier way to communicate during emergencies, but he was also enthused that he could control everyday operations with greater efficacy, resulting in major monetary payoffs. For instance, instead of being unable to reach workers at an inactive mine monitored through one of the many video feeds streamed into the operations centers, the foreman could quickly and reliably contact those employees and relocate them to a site that was operational. With the ability to manage so effectively through the new communications solution, the production manager was able to save thousands of dollars per hour worth of lost productivity.
This is just one example of the major return on investment that Mosaic achieved by collaborating with Omnilert. Other personnel, such as maintenance supervisors, also began using the new critical communication solution for functions beyond the pale of mere emergency response. Various divisions of the company now have pre-determined scripts for responding to diverse scenarios efficiently and without concern that messages won’t get through. Needless to say, Mosaic was very pleased with the results it achieved thanks to the flexibility, speed, and reliability of its new communications capabilities in conjunction with the ingenuity of its employees.
