If you ask your average person what a control room is, visions spring to mind of a room full of people, desks, monitors, PC screens and much colour & movement. You may not hear the noise in a control room as you are often separated from the theatre of operations by a thick glass wall, or perhaps you are viewing the room remotely.

How can you achieve optimal decision-making in a control room context?

The Key cornerstones of control

It makes no difference if your core business is transport, mining, logistics or critical response – there are 4 key operational cornerstones to achieve effective 'control'.

Planning – centralised planning and allocation of assets across an organisation. Assets are considered to be a dynamic pool of resources to be used across a business to meet client demands.

Sensing - management and tracking of assets, particularly early warning and action to mitigate threats to personnel safety, compliance standards and to the integrity of client service delivery.

Reporting – real time tracking of business delivery outcomes in accordance with Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). Timely production of business, compliance and safety reports specified by clients. Capability to review business operations to enhance continuous improvement and business resilience through trends analysis.

Response - ability to receive and respond to intelligence for events that may negatively impact clients. Dynamic re-balancing of assets and resources to cater for “surge” events that threaten service delivery, in addition to the management of major incidents.

Every piece of information can be vital

There is no such thing as too much data.

Every piece of information available to a control room can be vital in considering business operations at any time, 24 x 7, 365 days of the year. So, the tools that are chosen must be up to the task and provide an ability to:

• Collate and visually display real-time information of importance to the business.
• Monitor and alert users to situations that have the potential to compromise business objectives.
• Provide a timely distribution of key information to all stakeholders within or remote from a control room environment.

How can you gauge how efficient your control room is?

The control room may give the visual impression of order, of direction and of purpose but like a duck on the water it looks effortless gliding on a pond but below the waterline the feet are moving at warp speed.

Optimal decision-making through extraordinary Situational Awareness

Having the right people, with the right processes, analysing the right information, at the right time, with the right tools, to optimise decision-making for your organisation to achieve and exceed client expectations.

If you visualise it – you can use it. That’s where VUPT is ideal.

Not just a product, but a platform promoting excellence

One of the many benefits of VUPT is its ability to integrate to applications and systems that are already in use by any organisation.

VUPT RMM encapsulates the essence of all four key Control Room cornerstones of Planning, Sensing, Reporting and Response aligned to organisation and client requirements.

VUPT provides unlimited scalability and adaptability to meet any changing organisational or client user requirements.

And the operating model can be flexible.

You could choose to host your data and VUPT in the cloud, host it using your current infrastructure, operate a managed service, or you can choose to have a solution tailored specifically for your business needs.

So, you don’t have a Control Room?

Doesn’t matter.

Every user of VUPT has the information at their fingertips to be a mini “control room.”

With the emerging trend of decentralising workspaces and offices and an acceleration of Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM practices), an employee at home capable of accessing VUPT and information forms a “virtual control room” network that can fulfil many of the roles of a “physical” control room.

VUPT can become a very effective business enabler to provide more efficient use of organisational resources with enhanced responsiveness to meet the variable demands of business.

And that includes surge events – now that’s a topic in itself for another day.

Visualise – Utilise. VUPT.

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