Project Spotlight: Ventura Foods

Ventura Foods is an industry leader in food processing. Kenton Brothers has been working with the management team at Ventura Foods to help them develop and implement a surveillance system for improved physical monitoring as well as safety in the workplace. One key component of this endeavor is video monitoring.

Neal Bellamy headed up the overall engineering for this project. The solution he developed was presented to Ventura Foods so that they could see a logical and systematic approach to their video security needs. Neal devoted over 30 hours to the engineering phase using products from 2N Helios (IP-based intercom), Aricont Omni (dome cameras), Sony and Hikvision, and custom built servers running Milestone software.

Installation:

The project was underway, with one stipulation… it had to be completed within 30 days, start to finish.

The installation team assigned Nate Chapman to the project to keep the team moving and the project on pace. With a top notch cabling crew kicking off the project, Nate had them quickly progressing with the cable management phase.

Next came the Equipment installers. A strong two man crew (Jason Haney and Tony Shepardson) began the process of hanging cameras. Some of these cameras needed to be installed in hard to reach locations. You can see Tony hanging over a few tanker cars in the rail yard while installing one of the cameras.

We had four 26 foot scissor lifts and one 60 foot boom lift in operation for the first three weeks of this project. We had to be careful with equipment placement while working around the busy manufacturing schedule of the processing plant.

Next came the Kenton Brothers IT guru, James Stevenson. James started his phase of the project by building custom servers. He also set up 5 switch locations throughout the plant. This included fiber installation and testing of the backbone, and then making the cameras live.

Training:

After the team completed the system installation as well as testing, tuning, and configuring the systems, they did final cleanup and scheduled the customers first phase of training. James headed up the training and went above and beyond to make sure the Ventura Foods team had time to learn and understand the operation of their new system. After 2 weeks of “burn in” time, James went back for another round of training.

It takes a strong team with a lot of experience to install and configure a high-end surveillance system. We’re proud to say that Ventura Foods is very happy with their new system!