The Challenge

The PA College of Health Sciences was relocating from a facility on North Lime Street in Lancaster to what was formerly the Bosch Security Office Building and Warehouse on Greenfield Road. As a long-standing client of Heritage Communications, the College turned to us for help in integrating a new student management program with an effective state-of-the-art security and access control system.

The school needed a way to grant access to certain parts of the building for certain groups while restricting certain parts from others. From students to faculty to administrators, each group needed its own level of access. The college also needed camera coverage for all areas of the building, both inside and outside, and they needed a network to monitor the cameras as well as a storage solution to archive all the data.

Considering the new building was about 370,000 square feet and had approximately 500 doors that needed various levels of access control and monitoring, this was no small project. At the time, none of our competitors had the ability to meet the College’s needs.

The Solution

From the beginning, the goal was to provide a keyless system that would be card-based and easy to implement for administrators. The College used a software program called Colleague® as their student information system, so we knew we had to connect that system with the access control system we were installing. It was designed so that when a student was enrolled through Colleague® and given an ID card , they would also be automatically enrolled into the access control system, providing them use of that card to access certain areas of the campus. This automatic dual enrollment process has saved the College countless labor hours of database administration by not requiring them to administer multiple databases for student enrollment and disenrollment. Upon graduation, through Colleague®, the cards are disabled and the former student can retain the ID, but is no longer be able to access the campus. Meanwhile, faculty and administrators receive ID key cards that give them different higher levels of access.

Unlike typical access control systems, this card-based system didn’t just require door hardware. It also required a connectivity between doors and the main network to ensure the appropriate level of security for the building. We knew that hard-wiring 500 doors would have been cost-prohibitive, so we devised a wireless network that allowed us to reduce the number of hard-wired doors by 85 percent. This wireless door technology greatly cut down on labor and infrastructure costs but maintained the same level of security.

From conceptualization to completion, the project took approximately 18 months—a very aggressive time scale for an undertaking of this magnitude.

The Result

By the end of the project, we had installed 283 cameras, as well as a monitoring system and video archive to go with them. We also designed and implemented an entirely new system of access control for the school.

Previously, College administrators were responsible for some 3,000 keys and would have seen that number quadruple had they chosen to go with a traditional key-entry system. With the new system, they were able to essentially go keyless and reduce the number of master key-holders to about half a dozen.

The end result was a highly secure, state-of-the-art facility that can tightly monitor campus activities and provide easy access to video footage in the event of an incident. Meanwhile, the integrated access control system not only allows the school to track and log student activity, it also gives security officers the ability to conduct a campus-wide lockdown in a matter of seconds in the event of an emergency. Security officials can then unlock the campus in zones as the threat or emergency is cleared.

We’re proud of the work we did with PA College of Health Sciences and are proud to say they’re still a client. We assist them regularly with maintenance and service of the network, monitors and access control systems we designed and installed.