| The current office space utilises 3 readers; one on each of the exterior doors in the front & back of the building |
In 2009 Jeff Park, a Chicago-based entrepreneur, needed to set up office space for a Korean-based pharmaceutical company’s US operations in Chicago. To fulfill this requirement for his own needs as Director of U. S. Operations for PharmaTech LLC, he leased space in a downtown office building in Chicago, IL. Ultimately, he expanded the offices to provide a “coworking” space for professionals who work independently; these include programmers, copy writers, consultants and many other individuals who like the congeniality and amenities of an office as opposed to working solo at home or in a coffee shop. Mr. Park now operates the Ravenswood Coworking Group, a 4,000 square foot shared office space with a combination of private offices, open workstations, conference room and kitchen facilities. The space also offers individual lockers if needed by members as well as copier, fax and internet connectivity at a variety of membership offerings which make the space affordable and accessible to virtually any independent professional.
“Initially I provided access to the space by handing out keys to members,” relates Mr. Park. “Unfortunately over time there were a few people who let their memberships lapse but would still use their keys to get into the space at odd hours so we really needed to make a change in how people were allowed into the offices.”
The ultimate solution was an ISONAS PowerNet access control system. The current office space utilises 3 readers; one on each of the exterior doors in the front and back of the building, and 1 on the interior door to the conference room. The idea of tracking physical keys and constantly having a locksmith re-key the space are now activities of the past.
“I have complete and instant control over who is allowed into the building,” says Mr. Park. “We can assign specific schedules to individuals or groups based on their membership and contract requirements. For example, we have one member that’s actually a group that requires access to the conference room two days a month for a couple of hours to hold a recurring board meeting. We can accommodate this type of requirement easily with the scheduling capabilities of the ISONAS system’s management software, which is called Crystal Matrix.”
Despite having more than 30 concurrent members with a wide variety of scheduling requirements, the flexible scheduling and add/delete capabilities of the software make management of changing member requirements an easy task.
“We also initially needed to make sure that the system would be easy to install as we decided to do the installation with in-house personnel and it absolutely had to be cost effective. The other systems we looked at had a major turn-off of requiring a control panel and separate power supplies to connect to each of the readers. Since the ISONAS system runs on our already installed internal network infrastructure and uses Power over the Ethernet (PoE) we really got both ease of installation as well as cost efficiency,” says Mr. Park. “We are looking to expand into more space and we will be expanding our ISONAS system as we grow.”