Access Control and Temperature Checks: The New Dynamic Duo?

With the emergence of required health checks at the point of entry to a building during the COVID-19 pandemic, an Open Options customer had to figure out a way to deactivate access to cardholders in DNA Fusion 24 hours after they had a temperature check. It’s a new challenge that will likely affect many organizations in the weeks and months ahead. The Technical Support Team at Open Options is available to help meet this new demand.

The customer had never encountered this challenge before, basing access permissions on a person’s body temperature is a new phenomenon in the security industry.  The emergence of COVID-19 has made it a requirement for access control systems to include health checks as a standard feature to determine access permissions.  The access control industry’s responsibilities have increased to face this new challenge, and Open Options’ DNA Fusion software has beat that challenge.

Eager to make it happen, the dealer connected with Lane Ford, a Senior Technician in Open Options Tech Support, who proceeded to take on the challenge.  This is where most other comparable vendors would falter, but Open Options excelled because of the company’s customer-centric resilience and technical know-how.  Lane was able to leverage the fact that the customer had the feature-rich OpenDX package.  He was able to customize a package that would deactivate cards by personnel groups and access level groups 24 hours after an acceptable temperature check. The solution worked, but then the customer had some additional requirements.

Lane stayed on the task to meet the additional customer needs and had to create some custom SQL script implementations to meet the desired functionality.  However, once again, recognizing Tech Support’s expertise and go-the-extra-mile mentality, the customer came back with another tweak to the request, asking for even more functionality to be added. The last request was for the ability to “auto-activate” all new cards.

“Lane dug back in and worked out a way to meet their request fully,” said Nicholas Robran, Vice President of Tech Support at Open Options. “In constant communication with the customer, Lane was able to fully meet the customer request for additional functionality in DNA Fusion. Our OpenDX approach is by far the best method to tackle this new issue that has presented itself to the business world amid the COVID-19 crisis. In the end, the customer and the dealer were extremely satisfied with the result.”

While other access control platforms struggle to make customer COVID rules a reality, Open Options’ Tech Support team is on top of it. Bring it on!