Tecsec Security Solutions supplies CCTV and alarm services to McDonald’s throughout Western Australia. Additionally, Tecsec can customise security solutions upon request.
Challenges
In an effort to reduce their waste, McDonald’s in Tuart Hill identified that there was a lot of water and cleaning products being wasted from their washing up and sanitising sink. This was due to staff becoming busy performing other tasks whilst making use of the sink, often leaving taps running as a result. Additionally, staff were sometimes forgetting to change the sanitising water in a timely manner.
The original basic water alarm in place would be activated once the water reached a designated level, triggering an alarm that sounded similar to other alarm systems.
This existing alarm was a single alarm that would trigger a predefined timer as well as a visual countdown timer that could be seen from anywhere in the kitchen, along with an audible notification which would sound only for a short period of time.
Solutions – Water Wastage
Our in-house design team started with a modification to Tecsec’s existing custom back door alarm system, in order to deliver a working prototype that could sense the level of water. This sensor would in turn trigger a brief alarm, advising staff to turn off taps at the washing up sink as well as starting an LCD timer that can be seen up to 10 metres away to time the refill of the sink. This sensor system was in answer to the existing water wastage issue.
Solutions – Sanitiser Refilling
Once the refill timer was reached it would halt the timer and sound an alarm to notify staff that it was time to replace the sanitiser solution, in order to ensure the sanitiser was refilled at regular intervals. The process was automated, so it would restart once a process was completed.
Other Modifications
At the initial time of installation, we discovered that there was an issue where soap suds triggered the alarm sensors early. This resulted in a redesign of the water/cleaner filling system. The standard piezoelectric buzzer design is currently under redesign in favour of a vocal notification to make it stand out more from the other systems currently in place around the store.
Outcome
McDonald’s Tuart Hill is currently using the initial version of the alarm, in order to calculate the overall monthly savings. In the meantime, Tecsec are taking additional feature requests discussed at the original system installation and building them into the next version, which is soon to be released.