Choose your credentials wisely. No one wants to re-card their campus because the card technology they chose has become obsolete a few years in. Talk to other schools, research trends and poll your stakeholders. By selecting a credential that supports your needs today and your plans, you can avoid prohibitive cost and labor expenses down the road. And if you do decide a re-card is necessary, consider a phased approach here, too — perhaps issuing new cards to each new incoming class and anyone who comes in for a replacement card. Dual-credential reade
rs can help ease the transition too.
Make use of all your resources. Distribute daily monitoring of residence hall access and video to RAs and desk staff, putting more eyes on the system in a way that is relevant to your stakeholders. Use student workers and volunteers to help with device maintenance, testing and updating. Where it makes sense, expect other departments to contribute financially for the purchase and system maintenance. The more involvement you have from other teams, the more efficiently you will run your systems (and the more buy-in you are likely to receive).
Don’t forget about revenue. When researching solutions, it’s easy to focus solely on cost since it seems the most immediate. However, it’s important to pay attention to both sides of the coin. One-card programs can be significant revenue generators for universities. History tells us that the more options students have for using their campus cards, the more they will purchase with them — and the more revenue you will bring in as a result. Whether this means card-based vending purchases, off-campus spending or any number of other initiatives, an investment in expanding the value of your card program can have a significant impact on driving revenue.
Estimate the Return on Your Investment
This brings us to the topic of your calculated return on investment, or ROI. Take time to consider all the costs you take on today. You may not pay much per door to install a metal key solution, but how much do you spend each year re-keying and re-coring when a key is lost? If it’s a master key that is lost, that cost increases exponentially. How many lockouts do you handle per year? How many hours do your employees spend each week manually transferring data from your campus card system into your access control system? How long does your public safety department wait for patron data from your card system during an investigation? How does this add up in terms of labor costs, and how does it impact your arrest rates?
It’s worth your while to take a hard look at the costs you face today and how an integrated, automated solution could affect them.
Purchasing an integrated one-card and security solution is an important decision. Your surest path to success is to prioritize your needs (for today and tomorrow), bring all the players to the table early, and think big from both a functionality and a fiscal perspective. The solutions are available; you just need to determine the best way to bring them to your campus.
