Design 2000 has designed an Automatic Announcement system that directs workers including fork lift drivers and crane operators at the Ports of Auckland (POA).

Wireless Warehouse of New Zealand had contacted Design 2000 in August to produce a system capable making scheduled announcements over four talk groups of the POA SmartNet radio system. The Announcement system advises shift drivers when to change over and to park up. Design 2000's Managing Director, Peter Zeug, states "it's a 24 hour, 7 days a week, 365 days a year operation. Precise timing and flexible announcement scheduling is imperative for the seamless guidance of shift workers at these busy shipping ports."

Design 2000's business development manager, Case Boer, said that one of the challenges was how to handle the transition to and from Daylight Saving time. "Clearly we lose and then gain an hour - being a 24 hour operation, who gets to knock off early or who has to work longer?" Special announcement schedules had to be implemented on these two days of the year.

The Automatic Announcement system is based on hardware from our WaveCube audio players. An Ethernet connection to the internal homepage allows announcements to be changed or re-scheduled over the LAN and an Internet connection is used to synchronise the internal clock a few times a day by communicating with dedicated time generation hardware which is synced to a US military atomic clock. There is only need to enter the GMT offset which is +12 or +13 for New Zealand. The system is literally perfect to the second. Other features include automatic email alerts such as message failure due to busy or no response from the radio channels.