Access in commercial buildings
Access in commercial buildings often doesn’t stop at the front door and garage as it does in single-family homes. Lots of doors, gates and barriers, with many people walking through them… Investors and property managers face many challenges related to security, key and user management, control and solution flexibility. How can these pain points be effectively addressed?
What needs to be addressed regarding access?
A large-scale access solution needs to work perfectly and be easy to monitor. However, it becomes more and more complicated with every additional door, lock and user.
Corporate buildings
- Access for authorized personnel only – for the security of employees, assets and sensitive data.
- Create a hierarchy of access to different areas based on requirement for their job positions.
- Employees come and go, access rights must be easy and quick to change with the right permissions.
- Integration of other systems, such as attendance or alarm systems, into the access control solution.
- Manage access accessories such as fobs and cards.
- Ability to supervise access and grant rights outside working hours, for example for the cleaning team.
- Monitoring who has entered and left the building and when.
- Entrances to garages and staff car parks.
Hotels, guesthouses and apartments for short-term rentals
- Quick and easy check-in, as convenient as possible for guests.
- Changing access rights based on a reservation change.
- Special access rights for staff to facilities and areas where guests are not allowed to go.
- Access to common areas. This may depend on what the guest has paid for. Permission to enter the Sauna? gym?
- Quickly resolve challenges, for example when a guest loses their card during their stay.
- Integration of access with reservation systems.
- Entrances to garages and guest parking.
Chains
- A single unified access system for all branches – making for easier administration.
- Access to the cash room for authorized personnel only.
- Adjusting access rights to working hours and shifts.
- Camera and alarm integration.
- Defined times and zones for supplier access when loading and unloading goods.
- Flexible changes to access rights due to high turnover of employees and temporary staff.
The basis: a keyless solution
To effectively respond and resolve the pain points and challenges when it comes to commercial access, people need to move away from the mindset of traditional keys. Overseeing them, arranging for new ones to be cut and handing them over… just isn’t practical and does not have the flexibility needed for a business nowadays. Plus, the likes of losing a master key or a key to a sensitive area of the building will require costly lock changes (which can’t be done immediately), and in the worst case, unauthorized people will get into these locations and harm the business.
Just as we have moved from phone booths to smartphones, access solutions have moved from keys to chips, tags, cards, readers (often NFC) and codes. With bundles of keys being a true thing of the past.
A safe investment
It’s not that the card or chip pendant can’t be lost, because it obviously can, but instead it is the fact that an administrator can remove the access for the lost fobs immediately from the central management system – meaning that there is no delay (except for the speed of the person noticing and reporting the loss) making for a much greatly reduced risk. Moving away from traditional keys is faster, more convenient and above all cheaper than changing locks.
Such solutions save investors and property managers a lot of time and, above all, serves as an aid in preventing risks that the complex nature of a large buildings bring.
Count on powerful user management (Trust)
This complex challenge requires an extensive management of user privileges that can be assigned to groups of users and managed through a calendar, allowing for time-limited permissions – which is seen for example in Loxone Trust. Also adding, setting and removing tags, tabs and codes is intuitive – in one application. And you can do it either locally or remotely (securely, without having to send data to the cloud).
Large companies, chains and hotel groups will appreciate it that this system allows them to perform access management over all the branches across all of the different locations. This feature is called Trust. For example, it allows you to set up an NFC sticker so that an employee can use it to access both their home branch and the corporate headquarters, for example.
The person in charge needs to be able to keep track of all of this on one platform, in one software application, where they can also keep detailed records of users’ entries and exits at specific times.
Flexibility made for business: creative solutions without limits
The right access control system for commercial premises must accommodate a large number of doors, locks and users, and should have no problem connecting other less regularly seen access points like garage doors, for example. The business environment is dynamic and companies change over time, so the system is expandable without much cost or effort.
What can a truly universal access control system do in companies and hotels?
- Creation of time-limited codes for hotel guests or corporate visitors
- Creating specific access rights for cleaning teams
- Employee timesheets (thanks to open API)
- Entering one code not only unlocks/locks but also activates/deactivates the alarm
- Two-step verification through a combination of presenting the fob and entering the code
- Recording the consumption of snacks and drinks in the company bar for charging employees
- Access control to company lockers
- Access and billing for self-service 24/7 premises such as 24-hour supermarkets or gyms
- Notification sent to mobile phones. For example, confirmation that the guest has successfully completed their self-service check-in.
- Records of bicycle and ski rentals, etc. For a fee at check-out.
Tip: The NFC Code Touch is a real all-rounder for commercial building access solutions.
The solution? Building automation
All these possibilities are provided by the Loxone intelligent building automation system, which can comprehensively solve the access control system and connect it with other technologies and systems, such as alarms, but also lighting, audio and indoor climate control linked to the company’s operating hours or the presence of guests in the rooms (leading to efficient energy management).
It’s not just about products. With Loxone, you also get free access management software. The app for mobiles, tablets and laptops is intuitive, simple to use in order to manage users and receives regular free new feature updates.
Interested in Loxone?
Whether you want Loxone installed or you want to start offering your customers Loxone, speak to us about making that happen.