Industries · Manufacturing
Access control for manufacturing and production
Restricted production zones, subcontractor management, shifts and attendance integration - one platform for the whole plant.
What goes wrong
Six problems every plant recognises
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Restricted production zones
Not every employee needs to reach the production line. Damage caused by someone who should not have been at a machine can run into tens of thousands.
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Temporary subcontractors
Technicians, suppliers and quality inspectors need access to one specific area, for a specific window, and to nothing else.
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Shift overlaps
A night shift should not still be reaching morning-shift areas two hours after handover. Permissions have to work by the hour, not by the person.
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Compliance and audit
Regulators ask for precise entry logs. Assembling them by hand, once a year, is both slow and hard to defend.
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Payroll disconnected from the gate
With no link between access and attendance you either pay for hours nobody worked, or absorb overtime nobody approved.
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Critical assets
Server rooms, raw-material stores and expensive test equipment need access that is both restricted and documented.
Zone model
Four tiers, and every door belongs to one
Most plants map cleanly onto four tiers. Start here, then split a tier when the building demands it - there is no cap on how many zones you define.
- Red Most restricted
- Typical areas
- Server room, lab, control room
- Who gets in
- Managers and IT only
- Rule
- Every entry logged; access granted only on a manager’s approval
- Orange Restricted
- Typical areas
- Production line, raw-material store
- Who gets in
- Production staff for that line, plus supervisors
- Rule
- Subcontractors only where named explicitly, never by default
- Yellow Partly restricted
- Typical areas
- Finished goods, packing
- Who gets in
- Warehouse and distribution staff
- Rule
- Operating hours only
- Green General
- Typical areas
- Main entrance, canteen, car park
- Who gets in
- All employees
- Rule
- All operating hours; entry recorded as attendance
Subcontractors
A pass that expires on its own
The whole point is that nobody has to remember to switch it off.
- 1
Define the access
One zone, a start and end date, and the hours within those days when the pass works.
- 2
Send a code
The subcontractor gets a QR code or a PIN. No card to print, no key to hand over, no deposit to chase.
- 3
Watch it as it happens
Arrival time, time on site and the zones actually entered are recorded while the work is going on.
- 4
Let it close itself
On the end date the pass stops working. No manual deactivation, so no window where a former contractor still has access.
Shift permissions
Permissions that follow the rota
The same person, the same badge, a different answer at 03:00. Rules are written per area and per shift, so handover is not a security gap.
| Area | Morning 06:00–14:00 | Afternoon 14:00–22:00 | Night 22:00–06:00 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Production line A | Line team on shift | Line team on shift | Line team on shift |
| Warehouse | Warehouse staff | Warehouse staff | Managers only |
| Server room | IT only | IT only | Closed |
| Admin offices | Managers on shift | Managers on shift | Closed |
Anything not granted is closed. A rule is what opens a door, never what closes it.
Evidence
What you can hand to an auditor
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Reports built for regulators
Export to Excel, PDF or CSV, filtered by date, person, zone or event type. The 30-second version of what used to take days.
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Alerts on unusual entry
An attempt outside permitted hours, or in a zone the person has no rule for, raises an alert immediately rather than surfacing in next month’s report.
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Camera footage attached
Each entry record can link to the footage from that door at that moment, so identity is verified rather than assumed.
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One record for attendance and payroll
Access data becomes the attendance report directly. No double entry, and no two systems disagreeing about who was on site.
What changes
Before and after a rollout
A composite of what plants like this typically see once zones, subcontractor passes and the door-to-payroll link are in place.
Before
- Access zones tracked in spreadsheets, with a security officer assigned to maintain them
- Subcontractors on physical cards, with a few lost every month
- Deactivation after a contract ended took days, not minutes
- An annual audit meant days spent assembling reports by hand
- No payroll link - hours of manual reconciliation every month
After
- Zones defined in the interface, changed in seconds
- Subcontractors on QR codes that expire on the project end date
- Deactivation is one click, so there is no open window at all
- An annual audit report exports in under a minute
- Payroll data ready at month end with no manual work
Questions
Asked by plant managers
- How do we handle a subcontractor who is on site for one day?
- Issue a pass with an expiry: one zone, one day, and the hours within that day. When the window closes the pass stops working on its own, so nobody has to remember to deactivate it.
- Will this satisfy our regulator?
- You get a complete entry log with a timestamp, an identified person and the zone for every event, exportable for an external audit at any time. Whether that meets a specific regulation is a question for your compliance advisor - we will give them the log format in advance, along with our security documentation.
- How many zones can we define?
- There is no limit. Plants routinely run separate zones for each production line, raw materials, finished goods, the server room, offices and the main entrance, each with its own rules.
- Can permissions differ between shifts for the same person?
- Yes - that is the normal case. Rules are written per area and per shift, so the same badge opens the warehouse at 10:00 and does not at 23:00.
Map your plant with us
A 30-minute session where we build your zone structure together, on your floor plan, before you commit to anything.