Public Address

What is Public Address?

The use of loudspeakers to broadcast messages and/or background music to particular areas.

Public Address Equipment allows voice announcements to be made to part or all of your premises. The announcement may be simply "The lunch wagon has arrived" or "The fire alarm will be tested in one minute, this is NOT an emergency, do NOT evacuate the building" or it may be more serious "Duty First Aider to reception immediately please" or "There is a suspect package by the front door, please evacuate the building using the rear stairways and exits only." Or it might be "Fred Snooks, telephone call, dial 801".

Our Public Address equipment is quickly and neatly installed using standard telephone cabling and is easily extended for additional coverage. It can be operated from any phone or from a central microphone and can play background music if desired. Outputs can be zoned to allow music or announcements to be directed to individual areas and you can even make paging calls over equipment on remote sites.

Locating Staff

Most of our phone systems incorporate the ability to make a voice paging call ("Joe Soap, telephone call, dial 801") over the speakers built into every telephone. Using Public Address we can extend those announcements to cover additional areas like warehouses, corridors, car parks, loading bays and public access areas.

Every time you fail to put a caller through it costs you money. The caller hasn't got the response he wanted and may go elsewhere, and if you took a message you will have to call him back, by which time he may be absent, in a meeting, on the phone, or his mobile may be switched off. The ability to rapidly locate staff greatly improves your efficiency.

Health and Safety

How good are your emergency evacuation procedures? Many businesses  have regular Fire Drills where everyone evacuates to an assembly point, but this can be a very inflexible arrangement. One of our clients uses acid in an industrial process. During severe weather the outdoor tank was punctured by flying debris, they had a major leak and had to evacuate the building. The normal Assembly Point is the Car Park but that was awash with acid. By making an evacuation announcement over the Public Address System they were able to evacuate staff to a safe area. It's easy to find similar scenarios:- a suspect package, fire or other hazard near the main exit point or the assembly area. Members of the public or visitors who don't know what to do when the alarm goes off, or the need to quickly direct First Aid to an emergency. Public Address Systems provide a valuable safety enhancement, pre-recorded calming messages can be activated automatically or manually to initiate a calm and orderly response.