Aaron Cohen 
Manufacturing | Distilling
A National Historic Landmark distillery reaches crews across its campus, including people who work alone, with the Walt® Smart Radio System by weavix®
Industry: Manufacturing | Distilling · Location: Kentucky
“We didn’t move forward with Relay because it just didn’t really meet what we were looking for.”
Safety Coordinator
Business Challenge
The customer is America’s oldest continuously operating distillery and the second-largest whiskey distillery by capacity in the United States. It kept distilling through Prohibition under a rare federal license for medicinal whiskey, and its campus is a National Historic Landmark covering hundreds of acres: a distillery that runs around the clock, barrel warehouses, grounds crews, and tours that take visitors behind the scenes. Its crews work far apart, and many work alone.
Key challenges included:
- Alerts that didn’t land: Safety alerts went out through a phone-based mass-alert service, and phones don’t get checked on a working shift. “If guys are working like they should, they’re not going to be looking at their phones the whole time,” the Safety Coordinator said.
- Lone workers: Distillery operators sit in control rooms across the campus, and aging warehouse crews work deep inside the barrel warehouses.
- Tour guides on personal phones: Guides out on routes reached their managers by cell phone, with no shared channel for an injured guest or an incident on the grounds.
- Radios that cost too much to hand out: The intrinsically safe Motorola two-way radios on site run about $2,200 to $2,400 each. “I don’t want to spend 2,000 dollars per radio,” the Safety Coordinator said, to give everyone one.
- Relay in one department: The aging warehouse crews used six or seven Relay devices, but they were one department, and the safety team needed to reach crews across the whole campus.
Lightning, an active aggressor, a fire: the safety team needed every alert to reach people who weren’t looking at a phone.
“A lot of our distiller team members, they work alone and they’re in more like a control room setting. It’s going to allow us to at least send out those alerts and send that communication out to them.”
Safety Coordinator
Why They Chose Walt Smart Radio System
The aging warehouse crews were on Relay. When the safety team needed alerts that reach the whole campus, they switched to weavix. The Safety Coordinator invited a former Relay user to the onsite demo to compare the two firsthand.
Decision factors:
- Ease of use: “How user friendly you guys are.”
- A real screen: “You see stuff on the screen compared to Relay, all you see is the Relay device mini screen.” Walt shows photos, video, and every message written out, right on the radio.
- Built for hazardous areas: Walt is rated Class I Div 2. “What really piqued my interest was the Class 1 Div 2.”
- A proven company: “Y’all have been around a lot longer than Relay. So any bugs that Relay may have, y’all would already have adjusted for and fixed.”
- More for the money: “Relay was a little bit pricier than what we intended to be getting into,” with AI translation and transcription included in Walt.
See the full Walt vs. Relay Pro comparison.
The Solution
The distillery started with an evaluation run by the safety team, then trained its crews in late April, days before Kentucky Derby week, the busiest week of the year.
Implementation Scale:
- Current deployment: 157 users across seven teams, 82 percent of them active in September, with 78 Walt radios on site (weavix platform data).
- Evaluation: 40 radios and 60 users to start.
- Timeline: live in time for Kentucky Derby week.
- Expansion: after the evaluation, the distillery expanded the account, adding radios for distillery operations.
Channel Structure:
- Team channels: each team has its own channel, pinned to the top of the radio.
- Incident reporting: open to everyone, and set to play through for the safety team even when they’re on another channel.
- Security request: open to everyone, and set to play through for safety and security.
- Leadership channels: visitor center and grounds supervisors each have their own.
- Built by the customer: within weeks, the Safety Coordinator added channels on his own, including one for grain truck drivers and one for distillery leadership.
Departmental Coverage:
- Tour guides and guest experience: guides on every route.
- Gift shop: supervisors and managers.
- Security: the contract security team.
- Safety: the safety coordinators run the system.
- Grounds: crews in side-by-sides across the property.
- Distillery: control room operators.
- Aging warehouse: one radio per crew, kept with the person on the dock.
Radios live on charging docks. Each person taps an NFC card to log in, and the dock logs them out at the end of the shift. Office and operations leaders send and hear messages from their desks on the web radio.
Results
The safety team can now reach people who never had a radio, wherever they are on campus.
Operational improvements:
- Fast adoption: nearly 1,000 messages in the first weeks on the system (weavix platform data).
- Steady use: about 2,000 messages a month by July, and again in September (weavix platform data).
- Teams building their own channels: users created group channels as they needed them, on top of the ones the safety team set up (weavix platform data).
- Inspections on the radio: crews submit pre-use and post-use equipment inspection forms right from Walt (weavix platform data).
- A full shift on one charge: Walt’s battery averages 20.8 hours (weavix platform data).
- Ready for Derby week: the team trained crews right before Kentucky Derby week, the busiest week of the year, so the radios were on the tour routes for a week that brought record numbers to the distillery.
- Room to grow: the account expanded after the evaluation.
Safety and communication improvements:
- Incidents reported in one place: anyone can reach safety or security from their radio, and those messages play through for the people who need to act.
- Alerts answered in seconds: safety alerts sent this year were acknowledged within a minute, with a median of eight seconds (weavix platform data).
- Messages that get through: 95 percent of messages were delivered in under two seconds (weavix platform data).
- Frontline to office: distillery and aging warehouse leaders can talk to crews from their desks on the web radio instead of hunting them down.
- Alone, not out of reach: operators in control rooms and crews in the warehouses get the same alerts as everyone else.
“It fills a lot of our gaps.”
Safety Coordinator
REAL-WORLD IMPACT: HELP WITHIN FIVE MINUTES
A tour guide fell on the grounds and broke a wrist. No one else was around, and the guide stayed where they fell. The guide pressed the SOS button on Walt. The safety team didn’t know exactly where the guide was, so they used the radio’s geofence location to narrow it down, found the exact spot on the map, and went straight there. Help arrived within five minutes.
“We looked at the map and we saw their exact location and just went straight there,” the Safety Coordinator said. Without the radio, the guide would have had to reach a phone first, if they had one on them. “They could have been sitting there until they could track someone down.”
Key Use Cases
Tour Guides and Guest Experience: Guides on the tour routes carry Walt and reach their managers on their own channel. The guest experience and gift shop teams coordinate rides for guests who need help getting around the grounds. If a visitor is hurt, a guide can report it and send a photo right away.
Incident Reporting and Security Requests: Every user has an incident reporting channel and a security request channel. Messages there play through for the safety and security teams, so a report never waits behind other chatter.
Emergency Communication During a Power Outage: Fermentation gives off CO₂, and a power outage knocked out the alarms and ventilation in the fermenter areas. The safety team used the safety incident channel on Walt to tell everyone to stay out of those areas, then sent the all clear on the same channel once each area was safe.
Distillery and Aging Warehouse Crews: Control room operators and warehouse crews work alone or far from the main campus. With Walt, they hear the same alerts as everyone else, and their leaders reach them from the web radio.
Grounds Crews: The grounds team works across the property in side-by-sides, with radios assigned by crew. One channel keeps the whole team together.
Expansion Plans
Planned Expansion: The distillery already submits equipment inspections on the radio and is looking at more forms and workflows, at connecting weavix to the safety inspection app it uses today, and at sending alerts from its site-specific weather service and its fermentation monitoring system straight to the radios. Walt’s new Translator app is now on the radios too, and the Safety Coordinator sees it helping the security guards who check in truck drivers who don’t speak English.
Growing Into Operations: Walt is now spreading to the operations side of the distillery. The Safety Coordinator for operations watched the safety team’s rollout first, then started his own trial in one area, and another department has already asked to join. He watched the rollout “to see if it was going to be successful. And it very much was.”
Strategic Vision: Word is already spreading inside the parent company. A sister company with a largely Spanish-speaking workforce started a demo after hearing how the distillery uses Walt. “It just took word of mouth real quick,” the Safety Coordinator said.
