Real Estate
San Francisco civil engineering firm goes keyless to enhance security
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Director of Technology
Sherwood Design Engineers is a civil and water resource engineering firm in the heart of San Francisco’s vibrant Mission District. After nearly 2 decades, the company decided to purchase a building several years ago to secure its long term home. Due to its central location, the company has to protect its semi-public and private spaces from the many forms of potential unwanted street guests while staying welcoming and allowing tenants seamless access to the offices. Sherwood needed a keyless solution that allowed employees to easily enter and exit the building through the doors and elevator system.
Sherwood Design Engineers offices are using 14 Kisi readers to protect various entryways within their office building. These 14 readers secure the perimeter, IT room, elevator, and tenant spaces, allowing users to use their phones to unlock doors they have access privileges to. In the case of an emergency, they are able to put the whole site under lockdown with the press of a button, even if they’re not on site.
The company has created different access levels to easily provide the right credentials to groups of people depending on their needs. They use different access credentials for executives, staff, guests, and vendors.
In addition to their worries about accidental entries from the street, the office building they operate in was recently redesigned to include a public cafe area. This created a hybrid work/retail area and presented additional opportunities for the public to gain access to Sherwood’s secure areas.
With the opening of the cafe, the building’s previous exit doors were now required by the city of San Francisco to be emergency exits for the public. To allow continued seamless access in and out of the building for its employees, Sherwood Design Engineers integrated Kisi with the emergency alarm system. Now employees can use the emergency exit without triggering an alarm if their phone or keycard is swiped first, and the public can still use exits in the event of an emergency.
The feature Sherwood loves the most about Kisi is the remote management and flexibility of their solution. With Chuck Smith, their Director of Technology, operating from an out-of-state location, it’s critical that he can maintain the Kisi system from a cloud-based dashboard. In fact, during the installation of Kisi, Chuck was able to work with the installers over the phone to ensure a safe and effective setup.
Thanks to Kisi, Sherwood can efficiently keep their security under control across the entire organization with only two IT people. The key stakeholders, on the other hand, can access the user-friendly dashboard as needed.
The added security of having historical access logs and data is another benefit of the Kisi system. This allows record keeping of access logs and permissions to allow the IT team to monitor and analyze access events, both in real-time and historically, in the event of an audit.
