Burger & better

When a leading convenience food manufacturer opened a new food processing facility, they decided against a traditional coax cable-based CCTV system.

Coax was thought to be too inflexible for the new facility at Kirkham, near Blackpool, and the company decided to go down the IP route for its surveillance system, contracting Zoom CCTV to carry out the work.

Explains Chris Whelan, IT Manager for Kepak Convenience Foods: "The decision on a specification for the surveillance system was based on experience gained at Kepak's Preston site, where a traditional analogue coax cable based CCTV system is installed. Here, due in no small part to the company's rapid growth, reflected in the requirement to expand and redesign shop floor work space, we found the inherent inflexibility of coax awkward to deal with, when we needed to relocate, or add additional cameras to the system."

To allow easier expansion and repositioning of cameras, Whelan - who had overall responsibility for procuring the surveillance system - opted to go down the IP rather than analogue route. He believed this would offer the greater system flexibility he was looking for.

Visual audit

To ensure correct camera coverage, an assessment of the number of proposed camera positions and their specifications was instigated, with a full audit of the site, conducted by management, engineers and IT personnel.

The types of cameras to be deployed were chosen according to Whelan's criterion - the nature of the area and the precise visuals required.

For instance, in the loading bays, fixed, rather than pan/tilt & zoom cameras were prescribed. Comprehensive monitoring of delivery vehicles reversing up to ramps and the loading procedure could be captured without the need for fully functional camera control.

Experience counts

The job of making the IP surveillance system a reality was put out to tender to two companies.

Having supplied a competitive reply to tender and with the advantage of having previously installed surveillance at the company's Preston and Dublin facilities, Zoom CCTV was approached by Whelan once again.

Initially, he met with John Lawrenson, Technical Director at Zoom, to discuss and evaluate the proposal. Said Lawrenson: "We discussed the various security and a process control management scenarios Kepak highlighted, and we appraised each in turn to secure the best working solution."Because the site can operate 24 hours a day if production demands, they needed a "future proof" solution.

Said Whelan: "When you are committing a not insubstantial company resource of over £45,000, you really do need to be confident in your choice of business partner. The level of knowledge and experience displayed by Zoom in their ability to provide an effective, cost-effective solution, is reflected in their Panasonic Premier Installer status. Their Panasonic accreditation means that their engineers, surveyors and installation project managers attend regular training for technical support and service, and the benefit to KCF has been delivered in the product advice we have been able to obtain."

A problem for Zoom was that the system had to be installed whilst the site was operational. The installer worked within KCF's health and safety controls, right down to the detail of cleaning their installation equipment before entering the site.

Comprehensive coverage

Bounded by a brook, a railway line, and adjacent to residential housing, the food processing site's perimeter is overseen by six WV-CW860A dome cameras. The rugged domes feature a 22x zoom lens with automatic colour/mono switchover imaging. Inbuilt privacy zone masking ensures local residents' right to privacy. Guarding the security gatehouse and its main exit/entrance gates, a further two WV-NW470S dome cameras with 570-line resolution imaging and 2x vari-focal lenses, are installed. Powered by 240v locally, the video output is relayed back to the factory via coax cables. At the IT equipment room, the analogue pictures are processed by an AXIS A-D encoder and passed onto the IP Ethernet system via a network switch.

Within the factory, Kepak's own IT department installed a bespoke CAT5 UTP cabling network, along with dedicated IT cabinets, to supply internal cameras with Power Over Ethernet, distributed from centrally located IP67 network boxes. Ensuring the delivery of camera power within 12V DC tolerance limits, the CAT5 cable runs were kept to a maximum length of 70m. A major benefit of this method of delivering power over UTP was that it saved on both installation time and money when compared with supplying each camera point with a local fused spur.

Flexibility is key

In all, 9 KX-HCM280 PTZ IP cameras and 22 KX-CM230 fixed IP dome cameras are used to supply internal coverage. IP camera video in the factory is run over a fibre-optic backbone between fibre switches, joining point-to-point hubs together.

Said Whelan: "The functionality is better with IP. We further ensured this by separating the surveillance system from the IT data system, partitioning it on virtual area networks (LANS). The site's IT network structured cabling has approximately 300 devices attached to it.

"The IP surveillance system has not affected IT data transfer in any way. Greater operation flexibility is available with the ability to go 'outside' the site to via a wide area network (WAN) if required, for an external production manager to review the local food processing operation. Also, using UTP structured cabling, it's easy to add more cameras if required, as we've made sure that the CAT5 based system has lots of spare capacity built-in, ready to simply connect additional cameras into it."

The IP surveillance system is also used to monitor general security and management of the food process flow along the production lines.

IP control

A graphical software package is used on the local network to control the system's dome cameras 'on-screen', with a mouse from nominated network PCs. The site's manager and two floor managers can access the IP system and review recorded footage. Key managers on the shop floor can also access the system with a password but access is locked down to specific cameras. The factory floor staff is aware that the system is in operation, and this helps to ensure they comply with health and safety and hygiene regulations.

The IP system's camera networked images are recorded for 31 days onto a central server in the IT equipment room. Cameras are recorded using self-managing video motion detection programmed at a rate of 2fps.

Whelan concluded: "The strength of IP is in its ability to handle large numbers of devices, such as cameras, control points and recording nodes, and to communicate to them on an ever-increasing scale. Another is being able to add additional users and cameras, simply and efficiently."