Designing an electronic locking system for the Heart Center in Bad Krozingen, Germany, meet a variety of requirements. The solution is a LEGIC based combined online/offline access control system from H?fele.
Designing an electronic locking system for the Heart Center in Bad Krozingen, Germany, meet a variety of requirements. The solution is a LEGIC based combined online/offline access control system from H?fele.
The Heart Center is a modern health service center that specializes in cardiology, angiology and cardiac and vascular surgery and is one of the leading facilities of its type. In October 2007, the Heart Center opened its newly constructed annex building. This new building also prompted the decision to adopt a redesigned locking system. The solution implemented for the annex building has now been extended to include the entire building complex.
The decision to opt for an electronic locking system was an obvious choice. Those responsible for running the Heart Center were especially impressed by one particular point, “In the past, managing keys had always taken up a huge amount of effort,” said Bernd Sahner, the Heart Center's Administrative Director. In contrast, nowadays every employee has an electronic key in the form of a sturdy plastic tag. This ID credential contains a programmable LEGIC transponder chip. When a staff member clocks in on the LEGIC based time registration terminal, that day's up-to-the-minute access rights are automatically written on the transponder.
"Introducing the solution went smoothly,” said Sahner. He mentions another advantage of the new system, he said, “When an electronic key is lost, the corresponding transponder is simply disabled in the system. Previously, if a physical key was lost, this entailed considerable expense: We had to replace locks. In the old days there was always a potential security risk.” Security considerations were also a reason why the electronic locking solution was extended to include the single sick rooms. There are electronically secured cabinets and lockers for every patient in the Heart Center. These are operated either by a plastic tag or by a chip card.
The variety of requirements that had to be met and the size of the facility were factors which initially favored an online access control system for the Heart Center. With an online system, locking points and access authorizations are managed centrally on a server. However, this would have entailed having to wire all the doors. A purely offline system would not have been a realistic alternative. With such a system, it would have been necessary to reprogram each individual door in the event of any change. H?fele's Dialock Integra, a combined online/offline system, turned out to be the right solution. With this solution, an online access control system is supplemented by adding specially selected offline components. This way, central management of access rights can include room doors and even furniture doors that are fitted with offline door terminals. The offline terminals are specially developed components of the Dialock offline locking system.
In total, 12 external doors of the Heart Center are secured by wall-mounted online readers. Another 338 internal doors of office, equipment and service rooms are integrated into the online solution by using Integra off-line components. Various components such as profile cylinder locks or a door terminal with a printer are available. The locking solution also includes 865 furniture doors.