Many businesses depend on professional keyholders to assist with their access management requests, whether that involves alarm response, scheduled locks and unlocks or providing ad-hoc third-party access for contractors. Access has been managed this way for nearly two decades – and it works. Employers remove lone worker liability for staff members responding to alarms at night, time taken off in lieu is reduced and employees are kept safe. In short, everyone benefits.

But we like to stay ahead of the curve and in 2018, interested by the potential for IoT in our industry, we started looking closely at how smart locks might work in a commercial setting. What did we find? Along with being able to gather and surface incredibly useful access data through the application of smart locks, we also identified a huge cost reduction opportunity for our clients, saving them up to 93% on their keyholding and access management expenditure; a figure which could equate to thousands of pounds per property, per year.

But, before we get to the savings, let’s talk about what a smart lock is.

What are smart locks?

A smart lock is an electronic device that can manage and control door access. This can be a keypad, fob/card reader, biometric scanner, or something entirely different. As long as it’s electronic, controls access and uses an alternative to mechanical keys – it’s a smart lock.

To properly measure the potential of smart locks in our industry, we ran a trial with retail stores and high street banks. What we found was that smart locks could completely replace mechanical keys, solving several frustrating and costly issues.

To summarise, smart locks were a highly-secure solution that saved you both time and money, which leads us onto the most important point.

How do smart locks save you money?

It became obvious that smart locks could lead to a huge saving for our clients.

No more replacing locks and keys when employees leave the organisation or misplace items. No more paying external keyholders for ad-hoc access requests when an external contractor needs to enter the building. No more expensive temporary guards required to keep an eye on things when a door or lock fails.

There was no doubt that smart locks could have a major impact on access management costs but we still needed to get a clear idea of how much could be saved. So, we began investigating how to utilise smart locks in a way that would reduce costs without compromising on quality, security or flexibility.

The result was Smart Access, a smart lock solution tailored to businesses which uses smart devices in combination with our Smart Security Platform, enabling users to manage their access remotely, surface detailed access data and cut costs.

Smart Access is available with two smart lock devices:

• – The smart door lock – a wireless, secure, and cloud-enabled door cylinder which can be installed into most regular doors within five minutes

• – The smart key box – the only key box in the UK that is approved for use in commercial properties. It can be mounted outside of your property and accessed through one-day, digitally generated access codes.

Through these devices and the Smart Security Platform, organisations can completely remove the need for external keyholders as well as reducing other costs associated with access management. To create a clear picture of how much our clients could save, we estimated the average monthly costs for a traditional keyholding solution within a retail store setting:

These figures show a 93% saving for businesses that implement smart key boxes or a 62% saving for smart door locks, culminating in £7,596 saved per property over three years. A vast figure which proved the viability of smart locks in a commercial setting.

Learn more about what Smart Access can do for you

Smart locks and Smart Access can drastically reduce your access costs whilst providing other big advantages. Through the platform, Smart Access enables you to centralise your access management services, alarm response reports and more into a single location, uniting all your access data and giving you granular analytics at the touch of a button.

By bringing together data and access management, Smart Access is heralding a new age for keyholding and alarm response; one where there are no keyholding fees and you can make changes instantaneously, from anywhere.

Discover more about Smart Access today or for bespoke advice tailored to you and your needs, get in touch.