Challenge

A high tech manufacturer used smart cards to assign access rights to his 500 employees. visitors and facility staff. But security was low, costs high and the whole process neither smart nor convenient.

Approach

Our target was to accelerate the all over process, to improve the security level and to increase the convenience level for all the people involved in the daily identity managment process.

Lesson learned

It is absolutely fundamental that all parties are involved before the project starts: management, IT department, HR, legal, facility management and users.

Success model

Without understanding in detail the whole access process combined with identity managment the solution will not work smooth.

In an industrial environment there are always a lot of people being busy. There are employees, visitors, suppliers, cleaning staff, maintenance staff, building management, security staff etc. In almost all cases an industrial environment is an area which needs to be secured, and people moving around their need to be identified all the time to approve their authorizations. In such an environment typically different solutions available to identify people or to provide them authorizations. And of course a different level of authorization exists. To protect the facility against unauthorized access from outside a first level of security is a CCTV monitoring system checking the outside area, but also checking significant areas inside.

As the second security level we can see the access to the facility via i.e. a main gate or main entrance – we call this the physical access which for itself can have different security levels as well. It is a difference just to get access to the main lobby, or to get access to high security areas like research & development laboratories. Looking to the people who access a facility it is mandatory to implement different levels of security to assign access rights.

BBx ID Solutions collected plenty of experiences over the last years to design and to define and to deploy such kind of professional access control solutions using multi factor biometric solutions.

Challenge

A German high tech manufacturer used smart cards to assign access rights to his 500 employees, visitors and facility management staff for many years. For login to the PCs they used passwords, which needed to be changed every week.

For the employees it has been convenient to use smart cards and passwords as long as they did not lose or forget them. Less convenient for the administration and IT department was to change the passwords all four weeks, or if an employee came back from vacation and had simply forgotten his password. The HR time & attendance software was connected to the employees smart cards to approve time & attendance for salary and insurance purposes. Suppliers, guests workers and visitors got the smart card only for one day, so they needed to fill out documents, showing their ID card every day at the reception desk.

Approach

We made a deep dive to get the necessary overview about all required physical- / log in / SSO / time & attendance processes. Our target was to accelerate the all over process, to improve the security level and to increase the convenience level for all the people involved in the daily identity management process. After a solution design proposal we started with a pilot for 50 selected employees. This run successfully 4 weeks, so we entered a next step to use our solution fort the guest workers, suppliers and visitors. After another 4 weeks we could confirm that it also run successful.

What we have done was to implement a multi factor biometric solution for physical- and for logical access, as well as a time & attendance system using the same biometrics processed by one high level identity management software. After people had been biometrically registered, they got their different security level access rights defined via the identity management software. Same was done with suppliers, with guest workers and visitors.

Lessons learned

Especially in industrial environments it is absolutely necessary to have a clear picture about all required locations where access control is required. Using biometric technology depends on multiple factors, and these factors differ from location to location, from facility to facility.

It is absolutely fundamental to get all parties involved before the projects starts: top management, IT department, HR, legal, facility management and finally the users as well. Without understanding in detail the whole access process combined with identity management the solution will not work smooth. Therefore, the solution design, the accurate enrollment of all people, running a pilot for proof concept is a MUST.

Success model

All smart cards have been replaced by biometric technology. Forgotten or lost smart cards are not generating trouble in terms of additional costs or less security. Forgotten pass words, or pass word written down on paper to remember them are history. Suppliers and guest workers only need to be biometrically registered once – instead every time they come to the facility. Visitors have been pleased about the innovative, uncomplicated access methods.

So, we could improve performance, increase security and user convenience.

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