A Major Pharmaceutical Company

A Fortune 500 company maintains an expansive and global operation with multiple site locations and over 40,000 employees. As one of the 10 largest pharmaceutical corporations in the world, superior communication is vital to their continued success and optimum effectiveness.

Corporate communication systems have to consider employee safety as top priority. In research and advancement centers, preparation for any situation is particularly critical. IED customized an emergency paging system throughout its 6 Indiana sites and its Lilly Del Caribe site in Puerto Rico that was both precise in location and expansive as a part of the overall project. Each site included numerous buildings; the Lilly Technology Center, for example had over 50 buildings from laboratories to offices. One of their more specific needs was to incorporate incident specific emergency messages initiated from potential hazards of fire/smoke, chemical spills, biological hazards, help/man down alarms, etc. and interface with an external alarm system. Information on the type of problem and the required actions needed to be quickly provided to every person. They also needed to test every alarm in every building monthly without disturbing personnel, requiring a scheduled full system diagnostic with urgent situation and response monitoring.

Because of these requirements and the overall scope of the project, a distributed network of 8000 series controllers was used as the primary system. This allowed each facility to initiate emergency messages and monitor activity from a custom Graphic User Interface (GUI). A redundant copper analog system was installed in each location for a backup to the private Ethernet network for increased reliability. The IED system tied to an in-depth alarm code from a simple printer output, making it possible to use the IED database to assemble dynamic messages that inform occupants what and where the hazard is plus give specific instructions on what to do. To accommodate this and the comprehensive alarm testing, IED created a “preaction alarm feature” which allows alarms to be initiated, held for a defined time period for verification, and released to play if not cancelled.