Blue Fire Systems wins top national award
BY DAVID NUTTALL
Blue Fire Systems went up and received the trophy for the Best Fire Protection Project over $1 million.
I write to share with you some exciting news (and a tiny bit of shameless self-promotion) that vindicates our ongoing intent to do things ‘The Blue Way’. We are very proud to announce the news that at the 2021 Fire Protection Association Awards Gala Dinner held in May, Blue Fire Systems was judged ‘best in class’ and awarded Project of the Year (over $1M). This national award was judged by a panel of well-respected independent Fire Protection Industry leaders and experts from around Australia.
In summary, the award-winning project was the upgrade of one of the largest fire detection and evacuation system networks in the southern hemisphere. It involved:
Managing & maintaining full site protection throughout the project
Upgrading over 80 fire panels
Upgrading over 80 evacuation panels
Developing and installing advanced colour graphics management systems
Installing and migrating to a fibre-optic communication network
Fully testing all elements of the newly installed systems
It was a massive undertaking; performed in full without a single adverse event.
This was the first time we have ever considered putting in a submission to the FPAA Awards and it was fantastic to achieve this award on our first industry recognition venture. This recognition is also incredibly gratifying to the team (a mix of employees from Blue and our key customer) who worked so hard on realising a great and innovative outcome for the project.
The awards criteria was judged through a lens of 5 main categories, namely:
Commitment to Completion
Managing through COVID required a lot of flexibility and adaptive thinking but overall our success was underpinned by planning, execution, a great relationship with our customer and a shared vision, goals and understanding in relation to the complexity and challenge of what we did.
Commitment to an Innovative Solution
Blue’s knowledge of the customer infrastructure and our ability to contribute to the project from the ‘get go’ enabled us to develop and recommend some very innovative and tailored solutions, not only to very complex requirements today but also to support future the growth of our customer.
Commitment to Success
The core success of the project was Blue Fire Systems fundamental belief in doing things the right way, the first time, and doing them well, every time. During this complex fire and EWIS network migration, existing systems had to continue to be fully operational and we never missed a beat for the life of the project.
Commitment to Sustainability
The new system was also designed with the future in mind, ensuring that the system can scale, as our customer continues to grow. The backbone infrastructure now exists to facilitate this expansion, reducing the future damage to the environment.
Commitment to Best Practice
Blue’s directors have fostered a best practice culture where our staff strive to deliver quality work, that’s done the “Blue Way”.
Over the past two years, we took the decision to reinvest a substantial amount of company earnings back into our people by way of establishment of a purpose-built training facility, an in-house training and development curriculum and regular in-house training underpinned by rigorous assessment. This has resulted in a broadening of our technical capabilities which enabled us to take on the technical challenge of the network migration with a great deal of confidence. Thankfully, that confidence was well-founded.
We applied the same ‘Blue Way’ principles and approach to this project as we do with all our work on behalf of our customers.
Needless to say, we are very proud of our team and their achievement in this instance.
Warmest Regards
David Nuttall
Director
Blue Fire Systems