The Challenge
As a rural district council, Bolsover District Council (BDC) manage around 5000 properties and over the past few years have been looking to reduce their costs whilst maintaining a high level of accommodation for their tenants. As part of this process, BDC were looking to upgrade the communal doors at their housing properties, this included the door access control systems. With their previous access control provider, every time a fob needed adding or deleting, BDC used an external contractor to make the changes, leading to high ongoing costs.
The Requirement
When BDC made the decision to upgrade their communal doors, they went through a rigorous selection process to source new door entry systems and at the same time went out to the market to identify a new provider of the residential access control system.
Their requirements were straight forward. They wanted a system that allowed them to manage fobs without the need to get contractors involved. They also wanted a system that that allowed them to monitor fob usage and identify where there were unusual patterns or excessive usage. BDC also wanted to have their own staff trained to install the systems to greatly reduce the reliance on external companies.
The Results
Once the door entry system was selected, BDC were introduced to their strategic partner KMS, who subsequently won the project to supply the residential access control systems. BDC was quite unique in that KMS not only provided the hardware, but also trained the BDC staff to install and maintain the systems and the results have surpassed BDC’s expectations.
Councillor Mary Dooley, Cabinet Member for Housing at BDC, explains: “Once we made the decision to go with KMS, they quickly made us realise that we had made the right choice. Not only does the SimpleKey Web system allow us to add and delete fobs remotely, it has also allowed us to integrate with CCTV and other systems such as lifts, within residential housing buildings. We are also able to monitor fob usage constantly without the need to run complex reporting and SimpleKey Web, being a cloud-based system, has meant we avoid having to contact our external contractor to make any changes. In addition, the training for our staff has been fantastic, resulting in our own engineers being able to install the systems.
KMS have been superb throughout the whole process, providing excellent support and training, not to mention their fantastic product .Our objective was to future proof our access control for all residential properties, this has been achieved with the help of KMS and SimpleKey Web, which has reduced the time and money required to manage communal doors at our residential properties.”
