Ensuring your building or facility is ready to successfully handle an emergency situation is a stark reality for today’s building and property managers. While the technology that impacts the day-to-day operations of building occupants has dramatically improved, many facilities are still relying on outdated emergency management practices such as manual muster counts in an evacuation or using identity cards to track population. Adding additional complexity, large facilities that have multiple buildings on the property can create communication challenges. Employees often find themselves in an uncommon area of the facility and need to break through the chaos to find their muster station coordinator.
The advancement in building automation and security intelligence technology is critical in not only maintaining efficient and productive facilities but ensuring life safety as well. Let’s take a look at several of the ways that building automation, security intelligence, and entrance control can positively impact business operations in terms of improving life safety during an unexpected emergency or disaster:
Significantly improve employee safety
The positive correlation between employee safety and automated population counting is not a coincidence. With current automation functions extending through to operational settings, buildings are running smarter and more efficiently in terms of understanding which areas of the facility have employees within them. Should an emergency arise, building counts can be automatically and accurately generated for specific regions of the facility providing pivotal information to first responders.
Accurately assess risk for first responders
In addition to the increase in employee safety, this benefit also extends to the first responder crews who arrive on-site to manage the emergency. Through sensor-driven building automation and next-generation security intelligence systems, first responder crews can actively target the areas of the building that have reported occupants, and in what specific area. Advanced security intelligence systems can also provide first responders access to the video systems so first responders can see in advance what they are about to encounter. This real-time “reconnaissance” helps eliminate the need for guesswork and saves critical time in helping building occupants to safety.
Protect business assets and reduce theft
The ability to accurately know how many people are in an area of a building in real-time further protects the business against theft. A common theft practice is for criminals to enter the building with a large group, hide until after-hours, then steal whatever items they have found interest in. Real-time population counting enables security to know when people are in any area of the facility and address the issue if a policy has been violated.
Incorporating Real-Time Population Counting at the Entrances to Your Facility
The sophistication of people-counting sensors enables real-time population counting to become a standard feature in today’s security intelligence and building automation strategy. This technology can be found in all Smarter Security entrance control products like Fastlane Turnstiles and Door Detectives. Automated people counting sensors are built into the processor boards of all models and generate bi-directional pulse counts.
Discover the Difference People Counting Sensors Can Make
If you’re looking to bolster your life safety and security strategy for emergency situations learn how an investment in superior emergency management technology that includes entrance controls can help while also delivering significant operational savings. Download the Smarter Security white paper, Superior Emergency Management With Massive Operational Savings, to learn more.
