If an incident occurs on your premises, can you easily and quickly find out who was there, what happened and view related CCTV footage? With separate systems managed by different people — or, worse, managed by different third-party providers — this may not be as simple as you think. While individual systems designed for a specific purpose can have their advantages, the value of a combined and integrated system outweigh the benefits of a point solution.
With individual systems, access logs must be pulled from one system, cross-referenced with visitor records from another (which may even just be a simple sign-in book), and then matched to footage on another — and the difficulty and time is compounded if each person responsible is not immediately available. What if something happens overnight when there is minimal contactable management? Or over a bank holiday when personnel are out of reach?
An integrated system, with every part of the security system and workforce management accessible from one place, reduces the work needed to find out information about an incident because the systems have been designed to communicate with each other. This not only makes it easier to deal with problems, but it saves you time when investigating any incidents on site.
What is a point solution?
Point solutions are systems or processes that are designed to fix or solve one specific problem.
It is possible to purchase separate systems for Time and Attendance, Access Control, and CCTV, and many businesses throughout their growth will purchase only the systems necessary at that time, to save money, time, disruption, or simply because they don't need extensive additional features or functionality yet.
These standalone solutions can excel at what they do, but can they adapt to incidents or withstand scrutiny when something needs to be checked? Can they scale if a business grows beyond the scope of their current Time and Attendance system? What if a company moves out of a shared building into its own premises, requiring the installation of a new CCTV system?
For example, if a company needs to investigate a site visitor, they may need to check the access control on the doors, the CCTV along their route, and even the visitor logs. If each door, camera, or visitor log has a different interface or process it can take time to review, and the data might not be easy to collate and analyse together.
Benefits and drawbacks of point systems
Time and Attendance: a strong Time and Attendance system can give you granular details on the hours employees are working, calculate pay rates and accrued leave, integrate with payroll systems, and even log and manage site visitors. But knowing who is on site doesn't tell you where they are — including if they access a secure or dangerous area. Some systems have limits on the number of personnel that can be included, restricting its use if the company should grow.
Access Control: secure doors and gates are a vital part of a site security setup, especially if they are managed through a robust Access Control system. However, linking access control permissions to specific staff using data from a separate workforce management system may mean duplicating data from one system to another, needing to remember to add new staff and remove those who leave, and a lengthy process to change access rights based on working hours, promotions or temporary project needs.
CCTV: as a deterrent to discourage illegal activity, CCTV is excellent. It can cover a wide range of positions, access points, and potential vulnerabilities, and with remote monitoring doesn't always require 24/7 monitoring by company staff. However, a point CCTV system won't be able to show a suspicious access request in real-time, or link access logs to staff access permissions. And if a specific event is needing to be viewed, it can be a slog to crawl back through the recordings to find the required footage.
A disconnected system can cause problems. Without the systems communicating with each other, can you be sure of processes working efficiently? Temporary access should expire when a visitor's visit has ended, payroll teams should be generating payslips rather than correcting attendance data. If these are separate steps, you need to take time to generate reports and compare. These manual processes also open the door to manual errors.
The benefit of integration between systems is a reduction in duplication, manual time sinks, and improved confidence in the data they provide.
