Two-fers

Aug 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Michael Fickes

Remember those famous (or infamous) Mickey Mouse security tests in which employees pasted pictures of Mickey and Minnie Mouse over the ID photo on their employee badges, held up the altered card as they approached a perimeter guard station, and got waved through time after time by the security guard?

The tests showed that security guards sometimes pay more attention to moving people efficiently than to checking IDs, says Jim Francis, CPP, CFSO, a senior vice president and chief operating officer with the Tarrytown, N.Y.-based consulting firm of Aggleton and Associates. “Security effectiveness goes up dramatically when the person has to interact with electronics,” he adds.

Not only that — adding access control electronics to guard checkpoints can also produce a return on investment (ROI), in the form of reduced personnel needs. Better security plus ROI — a twofer.

While a security director wants to improve the effectiveness and the productivity of his or her employees, senior executives in the C-suite — the CEO, CFO or CSO — increasingly expect security expenditures to produce a measurable investment return.

In practice, a security director will often have to prove the financial value of an investment when seeking authorization to spend money to improve security.

Francis recently responded to a client's request to improve security at the perimeter of a large campus with that in mind.

Protecting proprietary information across a large, sprawling corporate campus ranked as the company's key security goal. At the time, seven security officers were eyeballing vehicle and pedestrian traffic — staff, vendors, and visitors — moving onto and off of the campus at five security gates equipped with booths and gates with lift arms — but no electronic access control technology.

Three of the gates provided access only to employees, while two of the gates accommodated employees as well as vendors and visitors. According to Francis, the plan called for card readers to be added at all five gates. At the two gates for employees, vendors and visitors, traffic would split into two lanes. Employees would drive through an access control lane, present their cards, and drive through when the lift arm rose. A security officer working in the booth would interact with visitors and vendors as necessary.

The access control technology improved security, but at a dollar cost. Francis and his client persuaded the firm's senior executives to fund the system because it provided a return on investment: The one-time expense of the technology replaced five security officers, with salaries that recurred every year.

The three employee-only entry points now operate with no need for security officers. Employees with authorized cards simply present their cards and the system passes them through. Previously, the other two entry points required two officers each, one to handle employees and the other to deal with visitors and vendors. With the new system, technology screens employees and a single guard covers the visitors and vendors.

The return on investment works out to five security officer salaries. Depending upon where a business is located, security officer salaries range between $35,000 and $50,000 per year. Reducing the staff by five security officers will save, say, $200,000 every year thereafter. The senior executives' requirements have been satisfied.

At the same time, security is better. Instead of a busy guard trying to eyeball ID cards as hundreds of employees flow into the facility, the access control system checks credentials and alerts a security officer to problems.

“There are other benefits,” Francis says. “If we need entry and exit dates and times for an investigation, the system has that information. And if we have an evacuation, the system will tell us how many people are inside the facility and generally where they are.”

Cost avoidance instead of ROI

Sometimes, the financial benefit to the company cannot take the form of an ROI because the available options each require expenditures. The decision is based on cost avoidance — figuring out which of several options will cost the least over time.

Francis describes how a “hoteling” system helped a large consulting firm with approximately 300 people, 50 staff and 250 consultants avoid costs.

Hoteling is a tool for firms with traveling employees. In a high-powered consultancy, for example, many consultants will travel two to four weeks a month. In a firm with 250 consultants, 150 of them may be gone all the time.

Why then should the company lease office space for 250 consultants, when only 100 of them will be in the office on any given day. Under a hoteling system, the firm will lease a minimum amount of space, and the consultants in the office today will be assigned temporary office space from the available space. In other words, each consultant works from a different office every time he or she returns from the road.

Such a system could be managed manually. A person could meet each consultant as he or she arrived at work, ask how long he or she expected to be in the office, assign an appropriate space, adjust the telephone number of that space, tell the information network who is sitting where today and program any access controlled doors to allow (or deny) entry as the authorizations require.

Francis has set up a system like this in which a kiosk performs the organizational duties that a person would otherwise have to handle. “I arrive in the morning and present my card to the reader at the kiosk,” Francis says. “A welcome screen comes up and asks the same questions that a person would have asked and learns how long I will be staying. The system checks the office layout for the day, assigns an office, switches the office to my phone number, sets up my network authorizations and adjusts the access control system.”

In this case, the firm buys the technology once and avoids hiring a person that would have to be paid year after year. The technology administers the hoteling system more efficiently than a person could. The firm avoids cost, gets a better hoteling system, and boosts its security capabilities with a system that can keep track of employees throughout the facility even though they frequently work in different offices.

That's a three-fer.

SHARE YOUR STORY

This page offers an opportunity for readers to share management lessons they have learned and to provide other helpful information to their peers in the industry. To offer suggestions, or to contribute to this page, contact Larry Anderson at (770) 618-0118 or e-mail landerson@securitysolutions.com

Want to use this article? Click here for options!
© 2008 Penton Media Inc.

This month in Access Control

• Opening Up About Door Closers
• An Enterprise Approach
• The Framework For Open Systems
• On A Higher Plane
• More from April's issue