Built in 1912, TianJin Polytechnic University is a well established full-time tertiary educational institution in China with 14 colleges, about 25,000 students, and 1300 lecturers and tutors. The University has a spacious and harmonious campus equipped with top-notch educational equipments and is further expanding and constructing a new campus session of around two million square metres.
Saving resource and energy, improving management efficiency and providing a comfortable learning environment are all major policies of TianJin Polytechnic University. To implement these policies, the University decided to deploy a cashless payment system for facilities in the new campus session. In order to ensure that the system is secure, absolutely reliable and user-friendly, the University chose the state-of-the-art LEGIC contactless technology from Tsinghua Mao Wu.
One of the major applications of the cashless payment system is for controlling water supply facilities in bathrooms and other area with hot water supplies. When the students or staffs use these facilities, they can simply insert the smart card into the LEGIC card reader and their water consumption quantity can be measured and recorded.
The same payment system is used for payments in restaurants, canteens and mini-stores in the University. All transactions are processed by LEGIC smart cards with stored-value feature. This system significantly facilitated the University in improving management efficiency and realised a totally cashless system for all activities within the campus.
1,730 units of LEGIC card readers were deployed for the new campus session. 180 units of these readers are used in vending machines at the food plaza, 1,440 units are installed in water supply facilities, 55 units are used for processing water supply transactions and the rest are used in the campus's access control system with multimedia central monitoring capability. The above system was officially in service in August 2006.
With successful experiences in implementing such a large scale cashless payment system based on LEGIC technology in the new campus session, the University is moving on to modification of the water supply system for the old campus session by installing LEGIC readers and will further expand applications of the cashless payment system in other facilities in the old campus.
