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Centurion to resell SAFLEC

In the May issue of this publication, the plight of local manufacturers faced with the growing sense of unease around locally-produced goods and the accompanying lack of confidence in the reliability and workmanship of said goods, was highlighted. And it is perhaps a fitting addendum that this article should focus on the new-born partnership of two home-grown manufacturers – one famous for quality and feature-rich gate automation products and the other a leader in the field of access control – and how this partnership will benefit installers, integrators and, most importantly, users.

Centurion Systems, the gate automation company with an approach firmly rooted in the security needs of South Africa was recently named as one of two official distributors of the SAFLEC access control systems.

SAFLEC has been lauded within the access control and security community, mostly owing to the offline capabilities of its various components as well as the company’s decision to move away from the traditional network topology and towards an infrastructure where only a single controller is needed per group or cluster of access points. According to Centurion Systems’ SAFLEC product expert, Louis Loots, “If your entire IT infrastructure was to fall over tomorrow, the system would still be able to make intelligent decisions.”

This sort of controller-based logic and autonomy is reassuring in today’s PC-based access control environment, where the security of people and our assets depends upon the synaptic firing of a bunch of semiconductors.

Loots went on to stress the fact that SAFLEC allows customers to control multiple remote sites from a single computer. A prime example is Centurion Systems, a SAFLEC client itself; the company uses SAFLEC access control at all of its branches – of which there are nine in total – with the main centre of control residing at Centurion’s head office in Johannesburg.

“With companies growing bigger and expanding into other regions, it has become important to tie the entire access control infrastructure to a single operational centre while still enjoying autonomy. If one site should go down, the remaining sites need to remain unaffected. There is one company that I know of that is currently controlling 4000 access points,” Loots added, speaking to the fact that there is no limit to how many access points can be controlled by the SAFLEC system. This is made possible by full LAN/WAN integration.

Furthermore, SAFLEC offers three software packages – namely the SACS Basic, Professional and Corporate Editions – with varying degrees of functionality to suit individual site requirements. The Professional and Corporate packages even allow integration with third-party devices such as biometric readers (Virdi and SAGEM) and CCTV systems. The software also enables users that have been granted certain access levels to initiate multiple actions from a single reader. What this essentially means is that a designated person such as a supervisor or building manager can, for example, open a door, switch on the building’s lights and disarm an alarm by presenting his tag at a single reader.

SAFLEC is available from Centurion Systems branches nationwide, all of which are able to provide competent sales and technical support on all SAFLEC-supported systems. In addition to Louis Loots, who has been with the company for five years, Centurion recently employed two SAFLEC product specialists, namely Ryan Nicholls (KwaZulu-Natal) and Johan van Wyk (Western Cape). Centurion’s sales office can be reached on 0861 236 887. The technical support call centre operates from 07:00 until 18:00, Monday to Friday and can be reached on +27 (0)11 699 2481.

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