Industrial workplaces like warehouses and manufacturing plants are noisy environments, even in the calmest of times. Machinery hums, forklifts beep, and ambient noise can easily reach levels that push traditional industrial communication methods to their limits.
These limits are often exceeded when companies begin scaling their work floor operations, leading to frustrating results. “Imagine a company builds its whole communications setup and then realizes it doesn’t provide full coverage or integration with the current tech stack when they introduce a new machine,” explains Ariel Posvolsky, Director of Customer Success Engineering at Algo. Such a scenario leaves staff unable to hear critical updates effectively, and companies must spend more money to bring the system back up to regulation.
This demonstrates how quickly legacy or rigid systems can fail under changing conditions. With modern, IP endpoints, however, communications can scale with you, allowing companies to gain a flexible solution designed to handle their changing environments while maintaining regulatory compliance.
Why Legacy Systems Put Companies at Risk
The regulatory requirement for industrial alerting is set at a high bar. OSHA mandates that employee alarms and warnings be perceivable by all affected workers. However, as noise within even standard warehouses frequently reaches over 80dB, cutting through that noise becomes increasingly difficult as operations, and sound levels, grow.
The problem is that the legacy PA systems many warehouses rely on were installed with a specific facility layout in mind, calibrated for a certain number of workstations, and configured based on the noise profile at the time of deployment. When the situation on the ground changes, these systems lack the adaptive sound or expansions capabilities needed to adjust.
The inflexibility of legacy systems creates additional operational challenges when trying to solve the problem. Expanding coverage to bring sound levels up to standard requires recabling, re-tapping distribution points, and significant infrastructure investment. This rigidity makes it nearly impossible to keep pace with business growth or layout changes.
Compounding these challenges, legacy PA systems operate separately from the UC platforms companies now use for internal communication. “The traditional public announcement system they have is now 100% siloed,” Posvolsky explains.
Such separation means that crucial emergency notifications, overhead pages, and safety alerts occur outside the main company channel, severely limiting response and visibility. This limits companies’ ability to trigger facility-wide alerts, enact shutdowns, or monitor their PA system’s operational status alongside other communication tools.
These combined limitations don’t just create operational inefficiencies; they put companies at genuine regulatory risk and create dangerous blind spots as facilities scale.
How IP Endpoints Bridge the Gap
The issues of scalability and siloed communications can both be solved with one solution: IP endpoints. That’s because their dynamic design allows them to adapt to changing environments, their flexibility supports evolving operational realities, and their direct integration with UC systems eliminates silos.
All of these strengths are illustrated with Algo’s IP speakers. For instance, the 8186 IP Horn Speaker uses dynamic volume control responsive to ambient noise levels, ensuring it can always be heard, no matter how loud the environment becomes.
The scalability advantages are equally compelling. The 8186 IP Horn Speaker uses satellite speaker technology to allow one primary speaker to power up to three additional speakers, dramatically reducing the number of network drops required and lowering installation costs. As Posvolsky notes, this gives facilities “breathing room for growth” without needing new infrastructure. When a customer discovers their initial deployment needs reinforcement, adding coverage becomes as simple as connecting additional speakers to existing units rather than running new cables throughout the facility.
Crucially, this device achieves all of this while being directly connected to the UC platforms a company uses for daily communications, ending the silo that plagued legacy systems. This integration now allows organizations to be alerted of incidents, trigger facility-wide alerts from their Teams or Zoom Phone interface, monitor speaker operational status through a unified dashboard, and automate post-event follow-ups with Power Automate to create intelligent response workflows for alerts.
All these advanced capabilities are housed in a rugged hardware shell. Algo’s horn speakers deliver peak outputs between 116 and 119 decibels, with specialized models reaching nearly 140 decibels for the most challenging environments, ensuring they can cut through even OSHA-threshold ambient noise. The devices use automotive-grade, UV-stabilized plastics and feature IP ratings for protection against dust and water intrusion, making them suitable for facilities that operate in freezing temperatures or environments with fine particulate matter.
The combination of intelligent audio adjustment, multicast scalability, UC integration, and rugged construction creates a communication infrastructure that not only meets today’s compliance requirements but anticipates the challenges that come with operational growth.
Building Communication Infrastructure That Scales
The transition to IP endpoints isn’t just about solving today’s compliance and coverage challenges, it’s about building communication infrastructure that can grow alongside your operations. IP-based systems are inherently scalable, with the flexibility to add devices, adjust configurations, and integrate new capabilities without replacing core infrastructure.
As industrial operations expand into larger facilities, add new production lines, or reorganize workflows, communication systems need to adapt seamlessly. The modular nature of IP endpoints, what Posvolsky describes as “Lego blocks” that can be assembled in countless combinations, means companies can deploy exactly what they need today while maintaining the ability to expand tomorrow.
Whether expanding speaker coverage for new production zones or integrating alert triggers directly into existing UC workflows, the infrastructure remains flexible and ready to adapt as operations grow.
Most importantly, unified communication integration means your industrial alerting system finally operates as part of your overall industrial communication and technology strategy rather than as an afterthought.
