Red Cross Bitburg-Prüm

The offices of the Red Cross district association Bitburg-Prüm were equipped with different mechanical locking systems. Appropriately, the people in charge at the time walked around with a huge bunch of keys. In addition, there were the typical problems of mechanical systems: expensive re-orders in case of lost keys, limited overview of the keys in circulation and no flexibility in case of changes. For these reasons, the district association decided to introduce an electronic access control system. On the one hand, the aim was to standardise access management across all locations. On the other hand, it was to be ensured that only authorised persons could enter certain premises - even if keys were lost. And it was important to have a clear overview of access rights.

Due to the large size of the district, only a solution with the possibility to perform also decentralised management could be considered. The general access management should be centrally located in the human resources department in order to allocate basic rights. In addition, it should be possible to allocate necessary special access rights locally, e.g. for meetings or events.

Another important aspect was traceability. This is primarily aimed at protecting staff and material. Thus, in the case of incidents, those responsible wanted to be able to see which doors had been entered and by whom, which immediately relieves all employees who are not affected. This strengthens trust in the organisation.

The Red Cross Bitburg-Prüm chose the SALTO Space system platform. The decisive factors were the functions and possibilities of the overall solution. The system fulfils all requirements, namely the central administration on the basis of a virtual network. At the same time, the very well-structured software provides the district association with simple door and user management. They were also convinced by SALTO's reputation - as long-term delivery capability was also important.

All doors that were previously locked mechanically should be just as lockable with the new solution. Therefore, mechanical cylinders were replaced by electronics, especially at main entrances, office doors and doors to sensitive areas.

For access management, the district association uses SALTO's ProAccess SPACE software with a total of 28 partitions. This means that the individual locations can manage their offices themselves, using users from the central pools of people. For example, there is a person pool "rescue service" from which eight locations, each forming a partition, make use of. In addition, at some locations there are local Red Cross associations whose members receive access rights to rooms of their local association as well as to other areas, since they work for the rescue service or in the administration of the Red Cross.