Blackline Safety expands its monitoring service

The Blackline SOC is staffed by professionally-trained agents who are experienced in managing safety alerts.

CALGARY and HOUSTON — Blackline Safety Corp., a company involved in connected safety technology, has announced a major expansion of its round-the-clock safety monitoring service.

The expansion includes growing the Blackline Safety Operations Centre (SOC) – an in-house safety monitoring service operated by a connected safety vendor, which operates 24-7, 365 days a year – by increasing the company’s specially-trained monitoring staff to meet rising user demand in North America. The company will also launch its first European in-house SOC in France this spring to better serve international customers.

“The more the world becomes a connected place, the more businesses are looking for a seamless, end-to-end consolidation of employee safety services,” said Sherrie Sawkey, Blackline Safety Director of Global Safety Operations, noting that the company expects to see a 100 per cent increase in the number of connected devices monitored due to the expansion.

With the market for lone worker protection in North America and Europe combined estimated to reach more than 260 million in 2022, Sawkey explained that the need for enhanced, consolidated monitoring services is on the rise.

“Employers want to deal with one vendor for hardware, software and monitoring because it leaves less room for error when every second counts, and that’s where we have a distinct advantage,” she explained. “As a result, we’re looking to expand the number of our monitoring agents by up to 50 per cent.”

Launched in 2015 to focus exclusively on safety monitoring through Blackline connected devices, the Blackline SOC is staffed by professionally-trained agents who are experienced in managing safety alerts – including skillfully handling gas and lone worker incidents – from receipt through to resolution by following each customer’s unique emergency response protocol and involving local first responders as needed. Since then, the centre has experienced steady growth, increasing from two agents to 20, who currently handle 800 to 1,000 alerts daily from more than 37,000 connected devices, including both wearable and fixed safety monitors.

“We are committed to providing the highest standards in safety monitoring and ensuring the safety of all our users, so they return home safe and unharmed,” said Sawkey. “The fact that such a small percentage of alerts ended up requiring outside intervention shows that our technology does what it’s designed to do: prevent emergencies before they happen.”

Blackline’s technology is cloud-based, featuring GPS-enabled safety sensors and devices that leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) to connect workers to live monitoring.