One of the world's leading aviation services companies is using electronic access control from SALTO Systems to protect and secure its cargo trucking and office facilities at Manchester, Heathrow, Edinburgh and Stansted airports.
Servisair Cargo operates at 31 locations worldwide, including 20 throughout the UK and Ireland, and handles 1 million tonnes of cargo per year on behalf of 600 customers. With business growing in the UK, the company wanted to improve the safety and security of its airside facilities by updating its mechanical locks and keypad entry systems, replacing them with the latest fully featured electronic access control system.
SALTO Systems were chosen to provide an integrated solution and the first installation was carried out at Manchester airport as part of an overall building refurbishment project.
Geoff Hill, Systems Manager from local SALTO business partner Keyways, says: "Servisair Cargo had initially considered fitting a fully hard wired system from another manufacturer but hard wiring an entire building for a fully on-line controlled system is prohibitively expensive and is not always technically achievable due to mains power and network cable run problems. We were able to demonstrate to the company that the SALTO system could provide them with a practical alternative providing almost everything that a hard wired system would deliver but in a stand-alone, wire-free format and at lower cost."
Once the go-ahead for the project had been approved, SALTO electronic handle sets were installed on to five main entrance doors in the trucking offices and to 23 internal doors in the cargo offices. These are controlled via a ROM i-Button system where access information is recorded and stored in the escutcheon and the ID carriers (the i-Button keys) are 'fixed'. This means that when user profiles are changed the iButton keys do not require re-programming. Instead the escutcheons and control units are up-dated. This is especially useful in those buildings where, for organisational reasons, updating of the doors is preferred over the updating of keys.
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| SALTO is now protecting Servisair Cargo at four major British airports |
One of the main requirements of the upgrade was that Servisair Cargo wanted to reduce the time needed to manage its access control system without any loss of flexibility, control or security. This was achieved this by allowing stand-alone locks to read and receive information via the ROM i-Button system. Since most user related access information is stored in an encrypted format on the ID carriers, this eliminates the physical restrictions of traditional stand alone electronic locks and allows both the i-Buttons and locks to be updated, restricted or deleted.
Following the successful installation at Manchester, Servisair Cargo then decided to upgrade their facilities at Heathrow, Edinburgh and Stansted airports. Engineers from the company carried out the physical installation of the locking hardware, installing it on 32 doors at Heathrow, three doors at Edinburgh and three doors at Stansted. They also performed their own computer software set up with specialist guidance from SALTO.
Brian Coan, UK Operations Director at Servisair Cargo, comments: "We have been very impressed with the ease of installation and the overall appearance of the SALTO product. It does everything we want of it which is access control principally, but some department managers at the company are also using its built-in audit trail facility on the main entrance doors to log in employees as they arrive for work."
