Fighting COVID-19 with flexible entrance control customisations

Agile product development has always been key to IDL’s success, and our customers play a vital role as insightful product developers. Listening to your needs is what drives our innovation and keeps the Fastlane and Door Detective products on the specifications for major corporations and projects around the world, including The Bower, the Pacific Gas & Electric HQ and many buildings within the new World Trade Center complex. Our team can develop products specifically for what you need – hygiene, population counting, temperature monitoring… let us know your need, we’ll get to work.

Never has the need for rapid product development been greater than currently, with the impacts of the Coronavirus being felt worldwide, and workplaces having to undergo a plethora of swift modifications in order to ensure the safe return of employees.

Over the past few years, entrance control turnstiles have been required to add additional value beyond just providing a physical security measure, so integrating third-party technology with our products to deliver added functionality is nothing new. Over recent months, however, we’ve unsurprisingly received requests for integrations which may previously not have been deemed critical, driven by the fight against COVID-19.

With invention and reiteration at our core, our teams are continuously designing new and improved products in response to changing market and customer needs, both in the UK and overseas, and they’re also experts at adapting our existing range to suit specific requirements, either for a new project or existing installations requiring retrofits. So, responding to our customers’ current needs, at pace, is all in a day’s work.

Responding to our customers’ COVID needs with flexible customisations

Some of the challenges we’ve been helping our customers solve as a direct result of the pandemic include:

• How can I monitor and control how many people enter my building, to ensure social distancing guidelines can be adhered to? Read more about this here.
• I want authorised users to be able to gain entry without having to touch anything, and without security being compromised. Is this possible? We’ve tackled this topic in more depth here.
• Is there a way to scan people’s body temperatures as they enter my building, and deny entry to anyone with a high temperature?
• We want everyone entering our building to use hand sanitiser before gaining access, can we enforce this
• With more and more people now wearing protective face masks, I need an access control system to integrate with my turnstiles that is capable of recognising this and is able to identify authorised users without causing delays. Bottlenecks are out of the question! Is there anything on the market this sophisticated?

 

The answer to all of the above questions, and any other question concerning integrations, is:

We will find you a solution.

Boasting an on-site testing suite, 3D modelling capability and with manufacturing taking place at our facility in the UK, it’s easy for our product development and design teams to work with our production team to test theories and quickly ascertain whether it’s going to be feasible to implement the requested integration. We can also easily identify what the impact on timescale and cost will be so that there are no unexpected hold-ups.

It’s this approach, along with our technical team’s ability to work closely with our partners and adapt our turnstiles to accommodate third-party products so that they look like an integral part of a complete system, which sets IDL apart from many of our competitors. We know how important the aesthetic of the finished piece is to our architect and specifier customers, so we don’t want that to be compromised by poorly considered bolt-ons rather than true integrations.

“Prior to the Coronavirus outbreak, more than 65% of our orders featured a bespoke element to them, made simple by our in-house testing and manufacturing capability, and we anticipate this percentage will increase,” comments Tony Smith, Major Accounts and Marketing Manager. “Our team is capable of integrating most things we are asked to consider, and thermal cameras or mask detection is not necessarily any more difficult than integrating card readers or lift destination controls. We wouldn’t want to limit our or our customers’ scope of thinking, so rather than prescribe a solution, we’ll listen to our customers’ challenges and then devise a bespoke solution to solve them.”

Listening to customers and adapting to their individual and market needs is critical, and has been central to our success over the past 35 years, so if you have any comments on our product range or any integration requests, drop us a line at info@fastlane-turnstiles.co.uk.