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Access and control solutions at Ocean Park

Background and challenge

Ocean Park is one of the world's acclaimed educational theme parks. Attracting over four million visitors each year, the theme park is a major tourist attraction renowned not only for its rides and variety shows, but also for its education and conservation programmes.

The park covers an area of more than 870 000 square metres and employs more than 1000 staff members.

Ocean Park used a conventional punch card time and attendance system. With the many different work areas requiring staff to enter and exit numerous times a day, the personnel department found it difficult and time-consuming to manage time and attendance records and organise the staff duty roster.

Ocean Park wanted a system that would easily collect and manage employee data which could be integrated to the existing payroll system.

Total solution

Following an investigation, Ocean Park deployed RCG's access control and time attendance system using RCG's i4+ fingerprint recognition device integrated to its Device and Attendance Management System (DAMS) software. The i4+ was installed at numerous access points for recording staff entry and exit. The i4+ can store up to 20 000 fingerprints enrollments.

It has a high-speed authentication processing engine able to read fingerprints at under 0,5 seconds per fingerprint.

The RCG i4+ works in both standalone and networked environments and can be easily integrated to any time-and-attendance management software. Each unit comes with built-in RFID capability and seven verification modes for enhanced security.

"In addition to its biometric features, it is tamper-proof and offers high security against physical abuse. Any attempt to open the device casing will trigger a tamper alarm. Data stored within the device is always secure, even if the system is completely turned off," says RCG Systems SA operations manager Mike Cox.

The system is capable of handling up to 32 different access zones, 99 groupings and 32 schedules. This allows management to categorise staff, monitor trends and provide more detailed reports.

This also enables the unit to be set to allow a particular staff member access to a specific area at specific times.

The solution was easily integrated to the park's existing network, enabling attendance records to be received from the different access points and then be integrated to the centralised reporting system.

On the centralised database, DAMS supports data from multiple departments, saving time in creating duty rosters and employee vacation reports while assisting the HR department to better manage staff.

Benefits

The solution has helped Ocean Park streamline its staff attendance and personnel system, implementing a fully integrated system. There is now flexibility in grouping and monitoring staff categories.

This has also reduced the manpower needed to analyse staff attendance patterns. The records are now consolidated, significantly reducing the administrative time for handling HR reports.

"In a high-security environment such as a theme park, it is crucial that even this level of security. One of the key reasons for Ocean Park selecting the i4+ was based on its high level of security in both tampering with the product and in manipulating data and the staff access process," says Cox.

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