Operating over 400 items of plant and equipment, M O’Brien Plant Hire, part of the M O’Brien Group prides itself in offering their customers market leading earthmoving, demolition and material handling solutions.
To meet with the increasing demands from the industry over safety concerns, O’Brien have turned to leading technology experts XWatch Safety Systems for the installation of their XW4 height and slew restriction systems to over 30 excavators in their fleet.
“We work in one of the most highly regulated industries with our clients demanding machinery which can be operated safely in all environments.” Dan O’Brien explained “We wanted a system that could give us the safety features both we and our clients wanted whilst being easy for the operators to set up on site. We found this in the XWatch system.”
The XW4 system can be configured to work on a variety of hydraulic plant with height and slew limitation controlled using proportional soft-stop hydraulic valves. A ramped slow down on approach to a limit with a soft stop prevents machine bounce allowing for accurate machine positioning. Limits can be either manually keyed in or set by positioning the machine at the desired points. If both limits are active, the system will automatically flip to the appropriate display should a hazard approach occur. Set up is simple, quick, and can be protected with an optional access key switch. All settings are retained and will be active on start-up.
Already operating a handful of rival systems in the fleet, the company wanted a cost effective and reliable solution to replace these units and in XWatch, they believe they have found just that. “The system is installed by our excavator suppliers prior to the machine’s delivery which makes it easier for us to control.” Dan O’Brien explains “The screen in the cab is simple to understand and set up and requires very little in the way of operator training making it more acceptable on site. As a company, going forward we will be looking at XWatch products as the benchmark for our machine safety systems and will be fitting them as our fleet is replaced.”
