One-Card Systems Ease Confusion at Colleges
Similarly, standalone locks are popular on the college and university campus. “The ability to use one card for all systems makes my life a lot easier,” reports Rick Jenks, security network administrator for the central Illinois Rock Valley College. “Card access also promotes safety and security on campus. With the electronic CM locks, we can pick and choose access areas and maintain a certain security level. Security is not compromised.

Faculty members and staff formerly were required to carry several keys, and lost keys meant replacing both keys and locks. If a building master key went missing, Jenks would have to re-key the entire building.

“There are major advantages to using the CM locks, particularly because of our many part-time teachers, who may not teach on a regular schedule,” Jenks emphasizes. “We used to have to track their keys down because so many people would forget to give them back. Now we can program the locks to simply deny access after a certain date. This functionality saves us a lot of time and money.”

“Manual keys are very expensive and time consuming,” Jenks notes. “With the CM locks, we only have to remove the card that was lost from the system. This is a great reduction in overall long-term costs.”

Jenks and one officer from the campus police department program the CM locks using a PDA. The college has also found CM locks appropriate in applications where hardwiring is impractical or impossible.

CM Locking Helps Secure Hospital Pharmacies
San Francisco General Hospital uses approximately 150 standalone computer-managed locks to control access to medicine storage rooms, pharmacies, sleeping rooms and other high-security areas. Unfortunately, their old system was troublesome.

“People were always breaking keys and losing them,” reports Locksmith Supervisor Armando Quintana. “We constantly had to re-key the locks, and it was costing us a lot of money and time. This place is so big that we were re-keying all the time.”

Quintana says it’s easy to remove access privileges of former employees as well as restrict access to sensitive areas at designated times. He also performs a monthly audit that has helped resolve incidents involving missing property. Quintana and the two locksmiths who work under him use their PCs and hand-held programming devices to reprogram the locks.

“With the CM locking systems, I don’t have to change everything when someone leaves the hospital or loses a key,” he says. “I just take the person’s name out and their credential will be out of the system. It’s only one change and, right there, you are saving a lot of money.”

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