Two million pounds of fish a day, one login
Silver Bay Seafoods replaced a patchwork of plant camera systems with one. The IT director's account covers production lines, food-safety audits, and the abandoned cars that kept turning up on the ferry.
Silver Bay Seafoods runs six processing plants across Alaska and the West Coast and, according to Spot AI's published account, moves more than 2 million pounds of fish through them every day. Wild seafood is seasonal, so the window to process a catch is short, and a stalled line or an overflowing tank means product that goes bad.
Before Spot AI the plants ran a mix of legacy on-premise systems, Lorex among them, described in the account as hard to use and slow to search.
We had a number of different camera systems across our locations before Spot AI. It was a nightmare. Now, moving our facilities to Spot AI, my job is getting easier. We can have one log-in and one source of truth to search for and find video footage.
That is Martin Wagner, the company's director of information technology.
Watching the line
Silver Bay has hundreds of cameras, and the account says supervisors have built the footage into their production automations to confirm protocols are followed and lines are flowing. More than a dozen plant managers use the cloud system, video walls show a whole plant at once, and cases save clips of bottlenecks for training.
We have cameras throughout every step of the production flow. Spot's AI Camera System allows us to make sure that workers are properly handling product and that they are working in a safe manner.
The company says it has been able to avoid tank overflows and food spoilage through the monitoring and alerts.
The compliance angle
Silver Bay holds BRC food safety certification, which the account says depends on reliable footage storage and retrieval. The company is also a government contractor, so its cameras must comply with the NDAA, the 2019 law barring surveillance equipment from specified Chinese manufacturers.
We work with the government and other health organizations. We needed a reliable camera system that was NDAA compliant and that wouldn't become a major upfront expense. Spot's free NDAA compliant cameras really helped us achieve our goals with a new camera system.
The company replaces about 30 cameras a year, according to the account, and gets them at no charge under Spot AI's pricing. In a wet, cold, corrosive plant, camera attrition is a standing line item.
Abandoned cars on the ferry
Some of Silver Bay's plants are off the Alaska mainland. In the off-season and after hours, people were dumping undrivable vehicles and other waste on the grounds. Each one had to go onto a ferry to the mainland for disposal, at up to $5,000 a time and several times a year, the account says.
With vehicle and people alerts, the company says it now catches dumping as it happens and has significantly reduced those costs.
What is and is not published
The story's listing title on Spot AI's site claims a 15 percent improvement in safety compliance; the body of the account does not say how that was measured. The figures it does give are the 2 million pounds a day, the 30 cameras a year, and the $5,000 per abandoned vehicle. The rest of the result is Wagner's own summary: one login, one source of truth, a job that is getting easier.