Ken Ousey, Regional Sales Manager at Traka Americas delves into how electronic key cabinets and asset management lockers revolutionized key access and usage at an Arizona facility.

Facility operations

Sprawling across more than 18,000 square miles, Coconino County in Arizona is the second largest county in the US.

You’ve been there if you’ve ever gone to the Grand Canyon or visited its county seat of Flagstaff.

Such a vast expanse of territory brings with it inherent challenges and requires a concerted effort from both county and city police to ensure the safety of its citizens.

While many departments and correctional facilities across the country may not be able to empathize with the geographic responsibilities of north central Arizona, they can likely resonate with the challenges and subsequent solutions the county has undertaken to improve its operational efficiency.

Just before the turn of the century, the Coconino County Sheriff’s Office and Flagstaff Police Department were operating in two separate buildings.

Population in the county had skyrocketed from less than 50,000 in 1970 to more than 100,000 by the year 2000 and both departments were in desperate need of more space.

The buildings were simply not big enough to accommodate their needs and officers would routinely have to bus inmates to other facilities because they didn’t have enough beds to house them.

A turning point in asset management

In 1999, a watershed moment occurred for both departments in the building of a brand-new, 180,000 square foot facility that would house the headquarters of not only the Flagstaff Police Department, but also the county sheriff’s office, local dispatch and detention facility.

The co-location agreement has allowed county officials to centralize and consolidate operations at a main hub, which promotes collaboration and gives them comprehensive insight into the collective effort of serving the community.

While the construction of the new facility was a major step in advancing operations for the county, there was a related issue that needed to be addressed regarding safety and efficiency, one that would ultimately be solved at a trade show 250 miles away from Flagstaff.

When Dallas Lilly, Facilities Manager for the Coconino County Sheriff’s Office, attended the ISC West trade show in Las Vegas in March of 2021, he needed to solve a problem: he had to find a way to manage key usage.

Too often, access keys to different parts of the facility would be lost or not returned in a timely fashion and monitoring them was serious burden.

“It was a huge headache,” Lilly said. “In our central control room, we had this monstrosity of a silly wooden key board and a paper log book.”

Officers needed to request keys manually and a staff member would have to sign them out individually. Once officers received their keys, accountability ended.

Management no longer had insight into where those keys went and some would be checked out for days or even weeks at a time.

Something small like a key can be hard to monitor through such a manual and archaic system, which obviously created a security problem for the department.

However, at ISC West, Lilly found a solution: electronic key cabinets and asset management lockers.

He saw the potential to not only safeguard against lost keys and assets, but also gain greater monitoring capabilities into who had had which key, when they were checked out, plus institute restrictive access control and curfew warnings for when a key wasn’t returned on time.

Several months before Lilly had his system installed, he was able to upload critical data and user access requirements online to the system’s software, which fast tracked the transition period to the electronic system.

When the hardware was in place, Lilly and the department were up and running.

“That made it really easy – having all the IP addresses uploaded beforehand,” Lilly recalled. “That can be the showstopper – if it can’t communicate and I can’t see on a computer, it’s dead.”

On the right track

The impact of the solutions were immediate. Officers no longer had to go to an employee to check out their keys.

They simply swiped their badge in at the key cabinet and checked out any key rings they had access to.

Also, identifying such rings became simpler, as they were illuminated with a green light on the panel.

Not all officers had access to all keys and the restricted rings were locked and identified with a red light on the panel.

Being able to remotely assign access to certain users and clearly see who has which ones provided Lilly with instant peace of mind.

“That’s the most beautiful thing about this system – being able to track who has the keys,” Lilly said.

“We have armory keys we don’t want the whole world to have access to.

“At the same time, my maintenance techs have keys to everything. It’s a beautiful thing and it works wonderfully.”

In addition to utilizing a key cabinet for access control, Lilly elected to use similar technology for another critical piece of equipment officers use throughout the facility every day: handheld scanners.

Officers routinely scan inmates’ wristbands when doing numerous activities including medical checks, gym time and visitation.

Those scanners are the lifeblood of monitoring inmate activity and are critically important to maintaining operational efficiency.

Just like with the keys, Lilly saw a need to better monitor, store and charge these scanners after they were being left unattended throughout the facility.

At more than $1,500 per scanner, that not only represents a significant security threat but also a costly expense should one of those scanners go missing.

As such, Lilly purchased an electronic asset management locker that allowed him to manage scanner usage in a central location.

The locker safely stores the shared scanners and charges them with a built-in charging mechanism.

The system includes a fault-logging feature that allows officers to identify issues with their scanner so that scanner can be taken out of rotation until the issue has been fixed.

Also, as with the keys, when a scanner isn’t returned on time, Lilly and other administrators are notified immediately, which significantly cuts down on time spent looking for a lost scanner.

The cabinet and locker solutions that Lilly has implemented have provided both an immediate and long-term return on investment in extending the life of shared assets, reduced downtime looking for lost items and increased operational efficiency through a self-service system.

Ultimately though, the greatest benefit of the system is being able to monitor every key and asset remotely at any given time.

“Before we installed the systems, we didn’t have any accountability,” Lilly said.

“We didn’t know when a set of keys was returned and someone could walk away with a set for days.

“It comes down to accountability in keeping your keys and assets in order and holding users accountable.”

About the author

For more than a decade, Ken Ousey has been the Traka Americas Regional Sales Manager for the Western US and provides innovative technology solutions that help manage and audit the physical keys and shared equipment that keeps facilities safe and operational.

For more information on Traka, please visit here.

This article was originally published in the Special February Influencers Edition of Security Journal Americas. To read your FREE digital edition, click here.