Making your lobby work

August 2008 Access Control & Identity Management

For companies that have made significant investments in perimeter security and access control,

the ability to automatically screen and track visitors

is an essential part of a complete security plan. LobbyWorks claims to have a solution.

Each day scores of visitors pass through the entrances to business facilities. The ability to screen and track them can contribute substantially to the safety and protection of personnel and property.

The LobbyWorks Suite offers solutions that allow companies to:

* Determine who is in the facility at all times.

* Identify unwanted visitors.

* Eliminate abuse of visitor badges.

* Protect the confidentiality of visitors.

* Facilitate communication between hosts, visitors, and security personnel.

* Improve lobby and security desk productivity.

How does it work?

In a matter of a few seconds the system can:

1. Scan a business card or driver's licence to gather information about the visitor. For pre-registered and returning visitors, badges may already be waiting for the visitor upon arrival and simply need to be scanned for check in. If required, LobbyWorks can display visitation rules or a short safety video.

2. Take a photo of the visitor and match it with the visitor information.

3. Discretely perform security checks to ensure the visitor is expected, not on a visitor watch list and have the visit authorised in realtime. During registration, LobbyWorks also consistently checks the visitor information against a list of barred visitors. The use of such a list is crucial in securing today's business site.

LobbyWorks checks for potential matches based on names and aliases, driver's licence numbers, pictures and more. In addition, LobbyWorks checks the visitor's information against expected visitors and those who have been on site before to reuse their information and process them more quickly as returning visitors.

4. Print an individual professional badge with the visitor's name and photo, expiration time, host name, valid access areas and any other required information. Visitor badges can be printed on B/W thermal direct label printers, inkjet or laser colour printers or dye-sublimation printers. Visitor badges can have features such as time-expiring stamps or tamper-resistant inks.

5. While on site, LobbyWorks proactively tracks if the visitor signs out as expected. For expired visits, LobbyWorks can contact the host to check if the visitor is still on site. This ensures that visitors are monitored at all times and that hosts enforce your sign out policy.

In many facilities, despite significant investment in physical security, tracking of visitors is still a manual process. The registration of visitors in a paper logbook and issuing non-descript visitor tags is often the cause of lobby inefficiencies and is a source of potential security exposures.

The visitor logbook is often inaccurate and incomplete. It does not consistently include the host's name, visit location, or sign out time and therefore cannot be reliably used in cases of emergencies and forensic investigations. The problem is drastically compounded for facilities with multiple entrances and with separate logs for different types of visitors. In addition, the visitor tags issued to visitors can be easily abused by impostors. Most of all, this manual process is recognised by many companies as a missed opportunity to collect detailed and accurate information about visitors, encourage visitor pre-registration, consistently check for barred visitors, enforce mandatory visitor sign out policy, and proactively track visitors while on site.

The LobbyWorks Suite is simple to deploy and use, yet flexible and powerful enough to meet the needs of small and enterprise customers with diverse visitor management processes and policy requirements.

The LobbyWorks Visitor Management System Includes:

LobbyWorks Front Desk

Register and track visitors. Includes: photo ID/business card scan, photo and signature capture, badge printing, visitor sign in/out tracking, watch list filtering, emergency list report, delivery and asset tracking, visitor access card tracking and much more.

LobbyWorks Kiosk

Self-registration station for high traffic or unattended lobby. Ergonomically designed with voice coaching. Visitors enter their information and are then authorised remotely by a security desk or the host employee.

LobbyWorks Web Centre

Used by employees to pre-register their visitors and by authorised security personnel to view visitor traffic in realtime as well as validate, sign in and sign out visitors' badges.

LobbyWorks Notify

Used by employees at their workstation to get real-time pop-up when their visitor arrives or if their visitor requires immediate authorisation. Also used to proactively track expired visits.

LobbyWorks Reports

Allow authorised personnel to generate detailed visitor traffic reports and graphs for each day, week, month or year. View traffic per employee, visitor, department, location, building or company - true reporting flexibility at your fingertips.

LobbyWorks Administrator

Tap into LobbyWorks flexibility and power to tailor it to your specific facility and business needs. Control security policies for visitors and contractors, user permissions, badge and report templates and much more.

For more information contact Konrad Weinert, sales leader - Africa, Honeywell Systems Group, +27 (0)11 574 2500, konrad.weinert@honeywell.com, www.security.honeywell.com/za





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