Project - Open / Closed 3 Remote Plants

Early in my career I would often be supplied with as little as one or two weeks notice when opening or closing a location. Working by myself, and later with my team, we would work to ensure rapid deployment of all computer network infrastructures, telecommunication systems, paging and alarm systems with night vision video recording, and any physical lock and key controls necessary for standard business operations.

Goals:

• To ensure telephony and computing resources are available upon the opening of a plant
• The prompt removal of the equipment upon closure
• The control of physical securities across the locations
• The deployment of plant chime and break time systems

When opening plants, network and telecommunications networks would be constructed, and contractors used to run cabling and install the alarm system. Any telecommunications contracts (T1, DS1, ISDN, wireless, etc.) would be negotiated based on the expected longevity of the location. My team and I would perform any equipment installations and configurations. Any existing equipment fitting the new requirements would be re-used. In closing any plants, all equipment would be recovered, and all contracts and services discontinued, transferred over to other locations, or re-purposed.

To shave costs, depending on building proximity, obstructions, and altitudes, roof-mounted point-to-point wireless transceivers would be used, along with an ISDN backup. As we used Toshiba telephone systems, Toshiba Expansion Cabinets would be used at the location and we would use low cost OPX (Off Premise Extension) and Dry Loop connections to connect them to the primary Toshiba PBX at the main office. This enabled extensions at the remote office to function in exactly the same way as a local extension on the phone system.  Unfortunately this technology is only good for up to 2 km's from a Bell station, thus it is not always available for use - plus this is not widely known as it is an extremely cheap way to connect buildings together with Bell promoting more costly systems / technologies.

Break time and paging systems were also customized to enable music to be played from a CD carousal based CD player during breaks, and different colored outdoor lights were used to help employees visually identify break times when they were outdoors.