I spoke with a customer this week who made an initial inquiry for electronic Visitor Management. The customer had just over 600 employees in head office in Melbourne with additional offices throughout Australia and several outside of Australia.
Some of the initial issues with the current manual system included an overworked reception area that gave limited quality of work to the reception staff as they could not handle the daily volume of telephone calls with constant visitor traffic among other normal daily tasks. Until asked it was not clear how much pressure the reception staff were under every single day.
The second major visitor management issue was the illegible hand writing in the manual visitors book with no contact information in the event of an emergency. The company quickly realised as we spoke further that in the event of an emergency they had no way of knowing where the visitor was in the building or any means to contact the visitor quickly.
As the discussion continued we started talking about contractors quickly becoming the 3rd major issue for the facilities management team. Many contractors come to location daily, regular and first time contractors that needed to complete a brief induction prior to being allowed on site. The induction lasted 12 months before it had to be renewed.
Reception staff also managed the initial induction process with all information recorded manually. As we discussed further it became clear the company actually did not have a way to produce a report on what contractors were inducted or what contractors had an expired induction without allocating several hours to pull the information together, neither the reception team or the facilities management team could produce any reports without allocating several hours to try and provide the information.
We then discussed what the company currently did in the event of an emergency which unveiled further issues with the current system when managing the evacuation process. The process was completely manual and flawed as they could not produce a meaningful report of who was in the building within minutes of being asked, it took hours and on occasions longer.
The biggest single issue unveiled was employees did not actually check in and check out of the building each day, some used an access control card to swipe in while many walked through the doors each day behind the person who swiped the card. As many as 35% of the employees each and every day did not actual exist with no recording of their presence in the building.
It became very clear in the event of an emergency the facilities management team actually could not produce any meaningful report of who was on location within 8 hours let alone minutes. The facilities management team actually had to contact the security management contact for the building an entirely separate company to order a report for the day, they normally got the report the next day.
How do you manage evacuation management in your buildings?
The access control report was a spreadsheet over 2000 lines long for one day of access control data that required a spreadsheet genius to determine who was actually in and who was out of the building at the time the report was produced. As soon as the report was produced it was out of date as the next visitor came on site. With hundreds of ins and outs due to morning tea, lunch, general business movements and smoke breaks it was impossible to use the information.
After talking to hundreds of companies about visitor, contractor and induction management we hear this exact story every day. Is this your company?
How would you like to be able to produce a report in seconds that could tell you who was on location in the event of an emergency?