Operating over 600 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 40% of excavators excavators in their fleet so far and climbing daily.

“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 making the process very straightforward when it comes to operator training. 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.”

About XWatch Safety Systems

XWatch Safety Systems was formed in 2018 with the belief that the plant, rail and commercial vehicle industries needed a comprehensive safety system that could cover a wide variety of operational scenarios.

The small team based in South Wales has over 100 combined years within the industry developing leading safety systems.

Whilst their competitors have developed complex systems, the XWatch philosophy is to design and build comprehensive safety solutions with a simple and intuitive operator interface and 100% compliance.

So far, the company have designed and tested over 10 different safety systems and sold over 550 units worldwide through an ever-growing network of dealers and installers.

Article credit – RPA Media/ UK plant operators