))) Bunches of keys a thing of the past at Mid-Gelderland Homecare

))) DALLAS, TX (December 12, 2000)

Ever since Mid-Gelderland Homecare (Thuiszorg Midden-Gelderland) switched to an electronic access-control system, the employees have had flexible and controlled access to dozens of buildings. The Arnhem security firm Brondool provided the solution, which was further developed by Triple Eye in Emst. The most striking aspect of the system is the key-tag produced by Texas Instruments, a tiny poly-carbonate cylinder with a transponder, which gives each employee a 'key' containing his own personal access rights.

Mid-Gelderland Homecare serves Arnhem and the surroundings. It provides care and nursing, household support, a loan system for nursing aids, mainstream and corporate social services, a childcare clinic and childbed care. Its private sister organisation offers special facilities, such as night-care, and manages personal budgets for the care of people with permanent physical handicaps. The operations extend to 450,000 residents and are run on a budget of 110 million guilders. Mid-Gelderland Homecare employs over 3,000 people, many on a part-time or a call-up basis. The work is distributed over 60 buildings and is often carried out in the evenings, at night and at weekends. Most of the employees need to be able to access four or five buildings; their supervisors often need access to ten. Until recently, this situation was causing great concern at the organisation. "A lot of fuss, irritation and hidden costs," says Henk Stapel, Facilities Cluster Manager at Mid-Gelderland Homecare.

Selective access policy

One of Stapel's responsibilities is to administer buildings. Obviously, this includes well-regulated access. Stapel: "Just imagine: until recently we had 60 buildings, each with conventional locks. Of course, no two were the same. Most of the staff – definitely more than half – had keys to them. But keys can easily be lost or burgled. As most people label them, we have to act whenever disaster strikes. We need to have a new lock fitted and distribute a new key on time to the personnel concerned. As we run a 24-hour operation, people could be standing at a closed door within no time. Things get even more complicated when the building has more than just a front-door key. People who come for, say, the childcare clinic have no business in the other departments, so we lock them separately. In short, it was sheer bedlam trying to knock some shape into our selective access policy."

Mid-Gelderland Homecare landed in this predicament because of its history. Stapel explains further: "We have recently crystallised out from a string of mergers. We kept putting off the introduction of a comprehensive key plan. Naturally, we considered setting up a system with master-keys and suchlike. We even discussed it with our supplier. But, theoretically speaking, a member of staff – and certainly I myself as Facilities Manager – could be walking around with as many as 60 keys. How do you regulate something like that? We soon found out that a system with normal keys was completely untenable in a complex organisation like ours."

'Stickies'

Brondool, the Arnhem security firm, which had already supplied Mid-Gelderland Homecare with various alarm systems, suggested an electronic key system. Brondool is, amongst others, a sales and service organisation for the Triple Eye engineering agency in Emst, which had developed a complete system based on key-tags, read-heads and an underlying control and communication infrastructure of Texas Instruments. "We knew each other from the judicial sector, as developers and suppliers of electronic locks for prisons," says Henry Jonker from Triple Eye. "We wanted to stop delivering to end-users so that we could concentrate on engineering and new ideas based on the latest technology. As Brondool wanted to add an access-control system to its services, we decided to bundle our expertise.

Mid-Gelderland Homecare jumped at the solution of Triple Eye and Brondool. Stapel: "We were looking for a system that would relieve us of the current misery. It had to be financially manageable and allow us to regulate access from a central point, so that we could control all the buildings at a distance. The Brondool system offered all of this – and much more besides. Everyone now has one key-tag – locally nicknamed 'stickies' – which gives him selective authorised access to certain buildings and departments. An added benefit is that you can also use the key-tag to activate and de-activate the alarm. Meantime, we decided to divert all reports to one alarm centre. That was another boost to efficiency."

How it works

Marco Merbis of Brondool explains how the system works: "It's actually very simple. It uses personally coded key-tags with a transponder, and a read-head that picks up the signal from the transponder. Each building has a controller that records the 'entries'. These are downloaded at regular intervals via a telephone connection to the central computer which runs the operating software. This connection can also flow through a fixed data line or a fibre-glass cable. We opted for a dial-in connection because real-time connection isn't crucial at Mid-Gelderland Homecare."

In February 1999, a trial was launched at a building on the Langewater in Arnhem. This location was particularly suitable because it already had electronic doors. Part of the building had to stay open until 11 p.m. as there was a lot of coming and going. After various other buildings had been easily connected to the system, the homecare organisation was again amazed at its own complexity. Stapel: "That's when you realise that assigning individual authorisation is no longer feasible. With so many people and buildings and such variable working times you need to structure your access policy. This entails defining user-groups for the various authorisations. It's an extremely complex business; we're still mapping it out. Also, we need to co-ordinate changes with the Personnel Department and introduce procedures to double-check, for instance, with the regional manager whether someone has actually left our employment. In other words, you can't leave everything to the system. We also need organisation and discipline. Across the whole spectrum."

Privacy

Some blunders were made, especially at the start when the staff were getting used to the new system. "Sometimes, they accidentally presented their key-tag twice to the reader and re-activated the alarm. A light goes on, but you notice nothing else," says Marco Merbis. "We have now built in a blocking mechanism, which de-activates the read-head for 15 seconds after the first entry. These problems hardly ever arise now."

"It will always be hocus-pocus to some people," says Henk Stapel. "Others feel that their privacy is being invaded when they realise that we can check when they enter a building. But this isn't the purpose of the system. We do not keep a personal register. I don't need to know who is in a specific building at a specific time – except in special cases, in the middle of the night, for instance, or if a theft is reported. There will always be employees or visitors who use someone else's tag to get in. So there's no foolproof way of checking whether someone is present. And we don't want to anyway. What we do know is that everyone without a tag is in the building under escort."

Extras

All the buildings of Mid-Gelderland Homecare are to be connected to the access-control system by the end of 2001. The organisation is already discovering the versatility of the system. Stapel: "The cleaning firm has its own key-tags, which admit their staff between 5 and 7 p.m. We have a similar arrangement with our office-supplies company, which replenishes the stock at fixed times. The logbook data tells me at a glance if someone's been along. We can give the call-up personnel 'unnamed stickies', which we activate for a few days. The location manager passes on the start- and end-dates and we do the rest. That's the advantage of the central management system that Brondool has developed. Soon we will place one-off authorisations in the hands of the receptionists among others: so that they can, say, switch off the alarm if someone wants to continue working in an evening. You can make it as flexible as you want; we still haven't discovered any limitations. And there are many more possibilities that we still haven't explored."

Stapel: "We purposely haven't compared the costs of the new system with the old one. Obviously, we have made heavy investments but these are at least quantifiable. The software was a one-off purchase. The costs of the old system, however, are incalculable. I can work out the costs of material, but how many hours have we lost in the surrounding rigmarole? The hidden costs were gigantic. In the past, my direct staff had to drop everything to step into a car and open a building somewhere. You can't let people wait around if they've come for a course. This totally upset their schedules. Fortunately, we no longer have to cope with such situations. We can even open buildings by remote control. I am positive that we will recoup our costs within three years. And we're saving ourselves a lot of headaches in the meantime."