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Westbridge Residential School enhances security and flexibility with a centralized electronic lock system, transitioning from a legacy mechanical key system to SMARTair™ Wireless Online for improved access control and safety.
After decades of managing door security manually, a residential school moves to a centralised electronic lock system for greater flexibility and safety.
Westbridge is a Special Residential School in West Auckland that provides intensive support for children and young people with highly complex, challenging behaviour and social or education needs. Its programme is designed to support students in acquiring new behavioural skills that enable them to successfully transition back to their whānau and into a mainstream educational setting.
The campus has teaching, administration and residential buildings with multiple and complex layers of access control for staff and students. The inflexibility and lack of control in the school’s legacy mechanical key system has presented challenges over the years for facility management in terms of building security and people safety.
SMARTair™ Wireless Online from ASSA ABLOY has provided a simple, campus-wide electronic lock solution for greater control, safety and security. Using a simple software interface, the school assigns proximity cards to individual staff, and allows pre-set building access according to staff roles; it can open or lock different zones at different times, and set up maintenance contractors with their own cards and access restrictions.
- Completed
- 2021
- Client
- Westbridge Residential School
As one of the directors of Western Lock Services, Kylie Bray has project-managed the school’s hardware maintenance for years. ‘The school were managing eighty-odd doors with locks from different eras – from the original knob handles to commercial sets,’ says Kylie. ‘It was a difficult site for them to manage and not fit for purpose for their needs.’
Kylie knew about ASSA ABLOY’s wireless electronic locking systems, so she and Joanna met with ASSA ABLOY’s Nitin Nambiar and Jason Furlong on site to look at the current situation and the school’s ideal situation. It was quickly clear that the SMARTair wireless locks and proximity cards were the natural fit in terms of school needs, costs, ease of installation and ongoing management.
‘SMARTair has given the school a simple control interface where they assign which doors can be opened by which cards,’ says Nitin. ‘The software sits on the school’s server and is connected to a network of nine hubs around the school. With such a system, the school can control access to areas within the school and even go for a complete lockdown should such a situation arise.’
‘Each member of our team now has one proximity card with personalised access rights,’ says Joanna. ‘We now have the ability to set higher security for specific areas of our site, especially over the school holidays when students have gone home. Our regular maintenance contractors have their own access keys, so they can just get straight on with their work without calling us to meet them for access. This keeps both our time, and their costs, down.
‘From a facilities management point of view, the solution has done absolutely everything we wanted it to do in terms of safety, security and monitoring. It has been a massive improvement.’
SMARTair™ Wireless Online is a revolutionary access control platform that combines wireless-enabled escutcheons and wall readers, connected hubs and intuitive management software, while still retaining the benefits of not having dedicated data cables. Having each door connected via wireless allows the user to monitor events in real time, remotely open/close doors and automatically update access privileges.
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