Carris Reels

Carris Reels is a truly remarkable American business; it’s a 100 percent employee-owned company that produces softwood, nailed wood, and plastic reels for IT, industrial and many other applications in the wire and cable industry. The business spans across 21 locations with 750 employees. We spoke with Justin Millet, the IT & Security Analyst at Carris Reels and the CEO, Dave Ferraro.

Why did you start using Kisi?

Our locations were only secured with keys, which lead to the problem of us not knowing if the door was open or closed or even locked or unlocked. We wanted to keep our locations safe and, although we’re based out of Vermont, you never know what could happen and we also wanted to use a secure solution—compared to the saturated market of RFID and HID Systems. Kisi provided a pilot at one of our facilities and we determined that it does everything we need, which is when we placed the order to equip the first locations.

What’s important about access control?

"User experience is paramount for us. We need to have our staff and workers access and travel around locations without issues," Carris Reels CEO, David Ferraro, said. "Also we like to partner with companies who are on a sustainable growth path and will be around in the future; Kisi seems to be one of those companies."

Have you encountered any challenges during the roll out?

Our headquarters is located in a relatively remote area so finding an integrator has been tricky; however, we learned that Kisi, as a system, was modern enough for one of our local electricians to install it without much training. We employ many factory workers who sometimes don’t have smartphones or company emails. Being able to map different user credentials to different types of employee groups has been crucial for us.

How do you use Kisi?

There are four different applications that we use Kisi for:

1) Our office so we can keep the doors locked and secure at all times.

2) Our manufacturing and warehousing facilities to enable: Factory workers to gain access at the time of their shift. Temporary employees to gain permissions quickly and be unauthorized automatically when contract ends.

3) Executive and operations staff who travel between locations for management or support reasons. Visitors who need a dedicated and tracked visitor badge.

4) Supporting cross-training of employees across different facilities

Did you do any special configurations?

Since Kisi is installed in a manufacturing environment, which is very loud sometimes, we integrated a Ring Doorbell using Philips Hue Floodlights, so when the doorbell rings the staff on the manufacturing floor know to unlock the door via Kisi.

What’s the future with Kisi?

Kisi has deeper functionality than we use at the moment, which is great because it supports our cloud roadmap. For example, we’re looking to automate on-and off boarding by synchronizing Kisi with Azure Active Directory once we have synced up our on-premise directory. We also plan on using Kisi’s API to synchronize access data with our analytics platform, Alienvault USM, to better understand patterns and trends. Eventually we want to have Kisi at all of our facilities to be able to have company-wide access badges.