Secure Engineering were invited to tender for a solution to enhance the safety, security and accountability of some 1100 contractors working within a packaging production establishment.

The Clients requirements were:

• Biometric; preference is for MSI technology.

And be able to:

• Assign sets of people to different groups. Each group be able to have different days and hours assigned.
• Log a contractor or visitors name, contact details, company, site contact, other skills they may have i.e.: FLT licence etc.
• Log a contractor’s induction date: send early warning of forthcoming expiry and prevent entry upon expiry.
• Log the company’s contractor review forms and prevent entry of all associated persons upon expiry.
• Link into the site fire system for roll call, so upon alarm it auto prints who is on site to an agreed point.
• Be expandable across multiple site access and egress points.
• Comprehensive reporting tool to enable view and print of contractors’ hours by Company/ individual as required.

With consideration to the client’s current processes and future requirements we decided on iEvo Ultimate readers used in conjunction with Paxton Net2 software.

Senior Engineer Morgan said: iEvo was an obvious choice for us.  Their ‘Ultimate’ fingerprint reader is CPNI (Centre for the Protection of National infrastructure) approved, meaning it has been rigorously tested under a multitude of environments and manipulation techniques and deemed suitable for use within Government establishments.  It also uses a MSI (Multi-Spectral Imager), which reads not only surface fingerprint data but also subsurface.  It reads nine layers deep, the fingerprint readers on smart phones read around two!  The subsurface data checks for ‘liveness’, debunking any myth of chopping off a digit will gain entry!  Utilising this type of technology ensures accurate reads in every weather condition through oil, grit, grease and even some latex gloves.  Paxton Net2 has a nice clear, intuitive front end to enable operators to quickly add and amend user details.  With the addition of their Timesheets application and Reports, it ticks all the boxes for this client.

We needed to be certain that what we provide would be up to the task at hand, (no pun intended)!

Noticing a vulnerability on site where unauthorised visitors could gain access through a small gate designed to pass toolboxes through.  We devised a solution where the gate could be unlocked with valid access control credentials, stamping a username and time into an event log for accountability.  Furthermore, if the gate is opened a series of three snapshots from the CCTV camera adjacent would be emailed to all interested parties.  Within the first day of this being operational, offenders were apprehended and barred from site!

For concerns relating to privacy and data protection, iEvo biometric readers take a unique pattern of reference points from the fingerprint, called the minutiae.  This data is extracted, encrypted and stored; the fingerprint is then discarded.  The system cannot be reverse engineered because no fingerprint data is retained.