Whether in agricultural grain stores or foodstuff warehousing, effective rodent control is essential.

Rodent control is not just about protecting food supplies and ensuring that the food industry meets the highest standards of hygiene: fines or closures imposed by inspection authorities damage both reputation and the balance sheet.

Atos and Multinational Chemicals Company asked how recent advances in the Internet-of-Things could help their clients achieve even higher and more cost-effective standards in pest control. The goal? Rodent-free warehousing, with special focus on food-producing and food-touching industries.

Smart traps and remote sensors are now helping specialist pest control contractors boost productivity and profit. Critically, the Atos designed Rodent Monitoring System means abandoning outmoded book schedules and making sure that every intervention counts.

The challenge

Overseeing pest control across hectares of warehouses and grain stores is often contracted out to specialists.

It’s hard and lonely work, with field staff looking after thousands of traps in multiple locations.

Until now, operatives have followed book schedules, checking and managing traps with no prior idea of status.

With costs calculated by the number of individual checks, food and grain clients were paying for negative results. Even more importantly, with this approach it is difficult to act pre-emptively, eliminating problems before they occur.

In the US, the economic cost of rat damage was estimated at $19 billion/year; many times greater than any other invasive animal species.

Source: Pimentel et al. 2000

The solution

When customer pest control team and Atos got together, the falling cost of smart sensors and the emerging maturity of the Internet-of-Things were soon part of the solution scenario.

The Digital Pest Management solution offers these features to enable Pest Control Operators (PCO) to increase productivity, reduce costs for customers they serve and stay compliant to standards enforced by food safety departments.

The digital pest management platform,

Offers device management features for the PCO to install & connect different types of rodent traps.
Alerts the team remotely as activity is detected within traps.
Sends heartbeat signals to inform that the trap is active.
Offers a mobile interface for PCOs to place & track the traps over an area designated for pest control.

Business benefit

Innovation happens fast with Atos. In this engagement, we went from initial discussion through to piloted roll-out in just 122 days. The Atos team worked effectively within a complex multi-vendor partnership engagement, where different parts of the solution were provided by different vendors. Effective integration, coordination and release management were key to success.

For the test group, the benefits were immediate and categorical: in formal evaluations, 95% of field operatives said they loved the solution.

Payback was equally unequivocal, with the professional service costs of rodent control reduced by as much as 80%.

Perhaps most importantly, the US test environments achieved an unprecedented FDA compliance rate of 99%.