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Systems that enhance security levels

The concept of visitor management as a tool to enhance residential estate security formed the basis of both Melissa Jacobs’ seminar topic and the Powell Tronics exhibition stand theme. A sales executive for the company, Jacobs has been involved in a number of high profile security installations at various small to large scale gated residential estates in the Western Cape.

Underlining the company’s stand theme, Jacobs spoke about the importance of identifying an estate’s strengths and weaknesses, in terms of for example, where bottlenecks are forming within the estate, as well as the lack of knowledge of who is on the estate and where they are located.

She emphasises the need for estate managers to effectively manage visitors and implement visitor management. This entails dispensing with the dreaded visitor books, promoting pre-authorisation of visitors by residents, and advocating adequate perimeter protection and internal security.

Hand in glove with these requirements is the need to calculate and manage not only the purchase price of a solution, but furthermore to understand that certain running costs will be incurred when implementing access control and visitor management, specifically when SMS forms part of the pre-authorisation function. Decisions need to be made on whether to adopt an on-site or cloud-based system and all estates need to factor in the implications of the PoPI Act when implementing a visitor management system. Ultimately, a true visitor management system is solutions based rather than merely a plug-and-play option.

Jacobs believes that the content of her talk, the session conducted by Vagn Nielsen of Helderberg Estate and by colleague Leonie Mangold on the benefits of the company’s PT-GUEST and PT-Scan visitor management systems, assisted greatly in driving traffic to their stand. A number of live demonstrations cemented the popularity of the two synergistic solutions and provided the delegates with the opportunity to see the products in action.

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