Ep. #27: Advances in Door Automation

of Marketing and Mike Fowler, the segment manager for the English. Vehicle sensing solutions. They discussed the benefits of using automated doors in all types of facilities these doors even better. You're listening to right from the source, expert insights on scientific. productivity, energy savings, and environmental control. Doc and the U.S.

We've got a Right from the Source podcast with two guests today. I'd like to welcome in John Schumacher and Mike Fowler. So gentlemen, uh thanks for being here today. Thanks for having us. Thank you so much, Ken. So first we're gonna get a little bit of background on each of you. So John, we'll start with you, your your title and some of your experience. Sure. I'm John Schumacher, Director of Marketing for Right Height Doors.

Been with Right Height for twenty six years, done a number of different roles within the company and I've been director of marketing and new product development for the last fifteen years. Hobbies and passions. I enjoy traveling and uh spending the summers out on the lakes with my family. So what about you, Mike? Yeah, I'm Mike Fowler from BEA. I've been with the company a little under 10 years. I'm coming up on 10 year anniversary soon. My my background is in telecom. I grew up in uh

startups doing fiber optic network build-outs. So, you know, sort of a big swing back to sensors. And as far as hobbies, I I I really enjoy my dogs. I have two dogs and Just recently uh rekindled a childhood hobby and and started doing woodworking again. So

Something you know the pandemic's brought up is is I'd find more time and and needed to find a new hobby, which is really an old hobby. My title is I'm the segment manager for our Uh industrial automation and vehicle sensing solutions divisions.

Well, definitely, uh as it relates to the pandemic, I think a lot of people took up hobbies, whether they were old hobbies or new hobbies. So I think we can all relate to you there, Mike. Let's talk about doors and specifically door automation. So starting with the basics, uh when we do talk about door automation, what are we really talking about? Is it simply just a sensor that triggers a door to open or is is there more that goes into it?

Simply yes, it's sensors that automatically operate the door. So whether it's a pedestrian or equipment or something coming at the door, it senses that the it needs to open and then it'll time out and reclose again. So we're taking the human uh element out of it and letting the door operate itself. Has this technology been around for a a really long time or is this something that has become more in vogue here in in facilities a little bit more recently?

We've had some door I c you could say maybe semi automation for a long time. You know, you would either have a push button or a pull cord or an induction loop in the floor. that would operate a an industrial door. However, with BEA over the last twenty to twenty-five years, the sensors have gotten so good that more and more people are going to either a motion sensor or a presence sensor or a laser sensor uh that's a little bit more complex.

And practical than than the other options. To echo what John said, uh, you know, BEA has been around uh a little over fifty years globally and about thirty in the US. And you know, really in that time we've seen A tremendous change in the way people use sensors. I would say I think the roots of it were in our pedestrian door division, where we're obviously pedestrian safety and automation there. On the industrial side, I think it

The the trend has gone from more operational efficiencies where we're we're making traffic better or and opening doors at the right time. You know, oftentimes the customer or the end user can't.

separate the door from the sensor. You know, they expect the door to open when they want and close when they want. So, you know, proper activation there really increased operational efficiency. And then you saw more of a trend towards Because we made that operational efficiency better and traffic was moving faster and with more confidence, then safety became

something that was important where we moved from just protecting, you know, the door and and the person right at the threshold to now, you know, moving safety further away from the door as traffic uh patterns changed and became quicker. And then obviously, and I think we'll touch on it, there's some, you know, hygienic benefits as well as security benefits that you see.

So I I think as you provide more on a door, the the end user asks for more and and and that's our challenge at BEAs to, you know, continue to make your door look, you know. uh more functional and more smart to the end user.

specifically during something like a you know, our the pandemic with COVID nineteen, obviously any any time that you can eliminate a chance of touch points and people having to congregate in certain places

Um I've got to imagine that's a that's a huge benefit to an automated door. Yeah, that's true. You know, we've had several industries who have wanted touchless activation for a long time. Things like pharmaceutical or the food industry, because if you're touching let's say meat, you don't want to cross-contaminate by pulling cords or touching buttons. So a lot of times those uh motion sensors have been there for the doors and even in pedestrian openings.

Um there's now sensors where instead of touching a button, you just wave in front of it. So while that's been big for many years in many industries, Uh it's now expanding to all industries who say, you know what? Why are we touching any of this stuff? We should be going and uh being a little bit cleaner.

In my career at BEA w I've seen, you know, very strong growth in in touchless solutions over the last ten years just as a natural trend, but but the pandemic really changed people's, you know, mindset uh on touching. You know, and for us it goes more to to the the hygienic part of it of just nothing should be touching anything doors shouldn't be touching people fork trucks shouldn't be touching doors you know really a non-contact environment in my opinion is what a sensor is for you know

People shouldn't be touching things, traffic shouldn't be touching things. And just we've really seen that explosion with the pandemic. I I don't expect it. I think we'll slow a bit as, you know, um we go on, but I don't expect that to go away anytime soon.

No, I I can't imagine it would. Uh you used an interesting word there too, Mike, uh traffic. And I know that with a lot of doors and some of the facilities that uh Right Height and and BA are gonna be involved with, there's gonna be Spots where maybe there's gonna be congestion that's created these higher traffic areas, how to automated doors. really kinda help protect the the workers who are in these facilities. Are are there ways that uh that technology has advanced for for safety reasons too?

Well well certainly with uh door automation you could set up uh traffic flow. So one door may only open up going one direction, another door may open up going another direction. So you can You could separate your traffic patterns. The other difference is because the doors are automated, if someone's driving a forklift, they're not getting off the forklift to operate a door. They're staying on the forklift. So you've got less interaction between pedestrians and equipment.

So I think that's helped from a safety standpoint. Absolutely, John. I think what we see is we started out with unwanted detections where we would filter out pedestrian traffic and cross traffic. And and there were operational benefits to that, but what we really saw was the safety benefits as well.

you know, only opening doors when they were absolutely, you know, wanted to be open. And and and then um, you know, even protecting things on the other side of the door. As you make someone drive faster through a door opening. You really have to be concerned with what's on the other side now or what's near the door. Um, because we've really trained the traffic.

in some instances to to just go flat out as fast as they can. As far as unwanted activations, I know more and more as door technology gets better. Um, i are there ways to to prevent the time when maybe a a door is triggered, uh a sensor is triggered and it comes up when it maybe shouldn't. Uh what what's the advancement like there? Uh yeah, actually over this last year we've added something called um false activation counters on our doors.

So through software, we're able to tell when the door opens, and if nobody goes through the opening, so no nobody crosses the photo beam or the threshold of the door, uh, and the door closes again, we'll mark that as a false activation.

So over time we can work with the customer to count their false activations to help them come up with maybe a better placement for the sensor, maybe a better sensor for that application. So you aren't opening and closing a door when unnecessary. And there's a couple benefits for that. One is Uh you know, doors are made to last a million cycles on a high performance door. Well if thirty percent of your activations are false,

Uh you're just wearing your equipment out more. You're s you're spending more energy to run the door. And if it happens to be a place like a cold storage facility, you're really wasting a lot of unnecessary energy by letting that warm air into your freezer. So this this false activation's a a really big deal.

feedback we get from the field is that, you know, I didn't buy a door to have it open all day. Otherwise I would have just had a hole in the wall. So, you know, they want to get the door open and get the door closed. So false activations to John's point on the energy side, it it's oftentimes why they made the high performance door purchase in the first place.

was to save that energy. If you don't automate and select the right sensors and configure them correctly, you know, you you're in jeopardy of losing a lot of that that savings. So you know it's the a lot of times the core reason they bought the door was

Specifically to keep it closed as often as possible. As we talk about how doors and and door automation has advanced here throughout the last several decades. What are some of these new features that that really I mean, we've kind of started going down in this road already here with the the false activations, but

Uh what are some other features that automated doors are are getting now that maybe they weren't uh even a few years ago? Well a a couple of the things that we've been doing on our doors from a really a safety and a information standpoint is not just

activating the door, but being able to tell you what's happening around the door or the status of the door for those pedestrians or even forklift drivers. Um for instance, Mike had mentioned earlier, we're expecting that traffic to go as quickly as possible through that door. And he mentioned the danger of something being on the other side of the door. We've added something called virtual vision using uh the BEA sensors to see if there's any motion on the other side of the door before it opens.

to flash some red LED lights to let you know, hey, maybe you want to slow down. Somebody's on the other side of this door. The other thing we've added over the last few years is LED countdowns, kind of like your crosswalk timer to tell you how many seconds you got to get across the street. We do the same thing for the door to let you know when that door is going to close.

to limit the chances of uh anybody impacting that door as it's closing. Mike, what have you seen go from, you know, microwave to lasers to, you know, what's some of that things that have changed over time? Sure, John. Um so Our our more legacy sensors were built on radar technology and and what one of the nice parts of that technology was we could filter out that pedestrian traffic and and cross traffic and do directionality.

and and things like that. Now when we move up the scale a little bit to something like a laser scanner, we're getting those same features, but now we can also have very precise activations of. So it sometimes, you know, safety and traffic starts as simple as if you can prove to someone that a sensor can open a door at a specific spot every single time.

the customer or end user will sometimes paint uh lines on the floor to make things safer because they're confident that this is a danger area or or this is an area of activation. And you know, to John's point, uh right height was very early on the virtual vision and and looking at things, you know, near door or what we would call offdoor applications, you know, warning indication, lights, sirens, you know.

simple traffic management type devices. When you bring that comfort level to the fork truck driver, they really, you know, they gravitate to it quickly and they adapt their behavior and become safer and more efficient. Yeah, uh kinda speaking of behaviors too, I know what one thing one product at right height. um developed recently is uh with Optiview and and connecting to the Internet of Things, are we starting to see some of our automated doors have that connectivity as well?

Yeah, absolutely. Um in fact all of our cold storage doors now have the wireless cards for OptiView. which can grab that information, hold it at the local door level, and if they so choose at a later date, they can tie it into Optiview, which is more of a facility wide or company wide gathering of that data. And, you know, we're doing things like we mentioned earlier of the um

false activation detection. We're also just getting data like what's your average cycle time? You know, if you've got a cold storage facility where every second that that door is open, you're losing money. How do we get your average cycle times down?

We've got impact detection. So if something impacts a door, say a fork truck impacts a door, we wanna know that. We wanna log it with a timestamp so you can go back to your video cameras and see how did that happen? You know, we we wanna minimize accidents in the future. How do we prevent them by going back and looking at what happened so we can avoid it in the future?

So any of the data that our door is going through is going to be logged uh locally at the door. And if you get onto the OptiView system, um you can look at it from a facility wide or or a company wide standpoint. It's a huge push in our organization too, John. We generally have developed and and manufactured relay-based sensors, which were for lack of a you know better term, just a switch. And the customer's appetite for data uh

is just exploding right now, whether it's through building management or at the door specifically. So it it's a big initiative for our company. We do uh make sensors now that just spit out raw data that customers, you know, write their own software for and can interpret. But Other than touchless, I think it's the number one mover in this industry is the end users want for more data and to get smarter about their operation.

So would you say that that's one of the key drivers for sort of this this revolution of of more data and and and more uh sensors with door automation, or are there any kind of safety regulations that are

that are playing a role in in any of these new uh features with door automation? I I don't know that there's any particular regulations that are driving it. Uh all the doors we produce are safe. You know, we Safety's number one uh in our mind as we're producing products and as we send something out.

Very basic safety regulations for doors are similar to what you have in your garage door at home, meaning they want to make sure nobody's gonna get trapped underneath your door. But companies care for their employees and they want to go beyond what just the regulations are. So While the regulations might say, make sure you have some uh

some laser beams at the door opening so that if somebody's standing there the door doesn't come down. Most companies want something more than that. You know, take safety out beyond the door opening. And that's where B EAs come in with a lot of these

Uh initially it was presence sensors. If somebody's standing two feet from the door, make sure it doesn't come down. But now with the more accurate laser sensors, you can set that limit wherever you want. You know, do you want to be two or three or four feet away from the door? And make sure the door doesn't move if if anybody's in that if any thing is in that area.

Yeah, our routes at BEA are are in pedestrian automatic doors and so Like John said, we're in some areas where you don't necessarily have a safety standard to meet, we always take the approach of going back to our roots of that pedestrian detection and You know, if we encourage the customer to set it up that if it's safe enough for my mom to walk through a grocery store door, you know, the sort of that level uh of of safety. And John's absolutely right.

the customers are starting to realize that that safety as your operations get better need to be need to be further away from the door. And even though we'd like the door closed, if something's there, it's safer to be open. We also see that the difference in the types of accidents you see on a high performance door versus a pedestrian or a garage door. Oftentimes not the door hitting someone in this environment. It's them hitting the door.

You know, they misjudged the speed of the door or or they made, you know, aggressive movements towards the door. And, you know, that's important too, because it's not just a safety issue, but it's also a cost issue. You know, you don't want to damage a door or a wall or or or like I said before, products sitting near the door. So like I said the people are really starting to gravitate to to looking further away from the door.

Now we've talked a a lot about safety here. But um I'd I'd love to talk about some other big benefits that high performance doors uh uh really bring to different types of facilities. John, I'd love for you to and you kind of mentioned this at the forefront of the podcast, a a few different industries that might be using automated door technology.

Uh can you talk about what some of those common ones are and and why those industries tend to use automated doors? Well, uh I think here in the United States. It was really energy efficiency that was driving a lot of the, at least the industrial, high performance automated doors.

So when you looked at things like coal storage or food distribution or food manufacturing, you'd want some separation of environment. Um pharmaceutical certainly since they've been around have wanted automated solutions t for clean rooms. air interlocks, things like that. In Europe, that really led or the energy prices in Europe really led to everyone getting into automated doors because the energy prices are so much higher there.

But that trend is is accelerating here in the US as well. While automated doors used to be kind of a niche market for certain industries, now every facility you go in has some high speed doors, whether it's a warehouse, Manufacturing facility, food, pharmaceutical Everybody's using high speed automated doors. You seeing the same things, Mike?

Absolutely. I think when I started my career with BEA, we were very, you know, food and warehouse focused, high traffic areas, high product movement. As John had mentioned, in the pharmaceutical environment, they have more challenges because You're not looking at just the automation of the door with the sensor, but also some of the aesthetics. You sometimes they need

stainless steel solutions or or they they try to avoid hard edges. So you know they have some different you know needs in certain applications. But boy in the last ten years I see more doors in more applications and rightfully so, they should be there.

it's really starting to become more of a a common thing that you see in a facility now as a high performance door. And with with our roots in Europe, you know, I I've seen that where there's so many more doors in in Europe and in the US because of those energy prices. And And now we we've seen that

you know it's not just cost of energy in the US but also that operational efficiency you know these doors open fast and close fast and and they're just good for operations so you're really starting to see them in a lot more environments. And I was gonna say one of the biggest things also is You're just taking out a lot of the human error or just

From an efficiency standpoint, you don't want someone to have to get off a truck, open a door, and then remember to close that door again. So by having the automated doors, it it takes that out of the equation. Absolutely. Well and controlled access as well. I think there's a security piece to this as well, John, where you know, we we only want people and product that are supposed to go through the door to go through the door as well.

you know, you're starting to see more RFID or or or other sort of access control devices coupled with door automation to to make sure the door opens for the for the right person.

So is there anything else that we might have missed when discussing automated doors that either one of you gentlemen uh would like to to bring to the attention of our listeners? When you fix a problem, whether it's with a door or with a sensor, it's very repeatable. Yeah, we oftentimes ask um to to outfit the most challenging door in a facility as a proof of concept. And if you can fix the hardest door, then you can fix the rest of them generally. Same thing with doors, I think.

Put a door in where you never thought you'd need it before and you might find that there's value there. And you'll find it real quick. I mean, the payback on these are pretty fast when you when you configure them correctly and have the right sense of the solution, I believe. Most of our sales are not, you know, a hundred doors in a facility. A lot of times if someone's never used a high-performance automated door before, they'll buy one to try it out.

But what you'll see is that'll rapidly expand through the facility. Once they see the benefits of one, they'll continue to buy, they'll continue to find new places to put them because they see the benefits. So any any of those listeners out there who are thinking about a high performance store, you don't have to buy fifty right away. I mean just start with that one, right?

All right. Well I think that's a a perfect place to end this one here today, gentlemen. So uh John, Mike, thanks for your time. We appreciate your your expert insights uh into this topic on automated doors. Listeners, be sure to follow Right Height on all social media platforms and visit right.com for additional information or to connect with a team member. John, Mike, thanks again, guys. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

If you enjoyed this episode of Right from the Source, be sure to subscribe on your preferred listening platform and follow. social media channels. Want more supply chain logistics solutions for your facility?