Linking the West

Sep 1, 2005 12:00 PM

WEST CORP., Omaha, Neb., is a provider of outsourced communication solutions, specializing in customer acquisition, customer care and interactive voice response services, as well as conferencing and collection services.

With 31 branch and remote locations to secure, West Corp. sought a reliable access control solution with an integrated badging system. The company needed the ability to network numerous sites across the country and monitor and program access control from the corporate office in Omaha. Moving the corporate office into a building with an existing system by AMAG Technology made an impression that influenced the decision of what system to buy.

West Corp. Security Manager Kenneth M. Lewis chose an AMAG Enterprise unrestricted access control solution with multiNODE 2 controllers and MN-NIC-3 network interface cards based on the reliability of the old system that remained in the building. The Enterprise access control system provided the ability to function on a nationwide WAN system and to convert various systems' hardware and databases.

Security Equipment Inc. designed and installed the security management solution and combined two separate security systems that controlled West Corp.'s 21 remote sites throughout the eastern United States and British Columbia. The remotes sites were upgraded to the Enterprise server located in Omaha via its WAN.

Each West site operates as a separate company, and therefore is in control of its own security database, says Tom Hruby, executive vice president of Security Equipment Inc., Omaha, Neb. Each office creates and prints employee badges either through a full administrative client or a Web client.

“As each site was upgraded to AMAG, SEi performed a separate database conversion specifically for that site to help control the amount of information that would have to be entered into both systems during the upgrade,” Hruby says.

The Network Operations Center (NOC) at the corporate office is staffed 24 hours a day and monitors all remote sites. Only West's inbound offices — where people call in to order merchandise advertised on television — are open 24 hours a day. The remainder of the offices are outbound offices where West staff call their customer base for a designated reason.

Each facility has security guards on site during business hours and roaming guards after hours. Alarms come into the NOC, and security personnel dispatch the appropriate guard in the city wherever the alarm was generated.

Approximately 300-500 employees work at each West office, resulting in more than 32,000 cardholders. West badges approximately 300 employees a day on average thus tasking the security system to process thousands of card transactions each day. Each employee is required to display his photo ID badge at all times and must have valid access to enter his designated building.

While each office badges its own employees and controls its own database, the Omaha corporate office needed master access to all offices for standardization purposes.

“With more than 30,000 employees, they are concerned that all badges look the same, all the field entries are consistent, and they have ultimate control on what is put into their system,” Hruby says. “All the sites were originally programmed into the system from Omaha so all the terminology would be the same, all the maps would look and feel the same, and all of the operator instructions would have the same terminology.”

West uses approximately 325 readers throughout its 31 locations: Proximity is used at the corporate office, magnetic stripe in the Omaha locations and barcode at the remote sites.

Training security staff, however, proved difficult with the numerous remote locations.

“Having the networked AMAG system and the ability to ‘see what they see’ from the corporate location provided essentially a hands-on training experience and reduced the amount of time needed to complete the training,” Lewis says.

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