Large Electric Utility Company Uses EasyLobby to Protect People and Assets

Visitor Management at Electric Utilities

By the numbers:

Visitors per day badged at this electric utility:  One to two thousand visitors per day on average

EasyLobby systems in place:  Monitoring visitor entry to 30 buildings

EasyLobby stations: Approximately 46

Background

Many of the country’s largest electric utilities use EasyLobby Secure Visitor Management (SVM) to control costs, comply with federal regulations requiring them to know exactly who has entered their facilities, and to screen out unwanted visitors and contractors.

This large utility with more than 5 million customers is one the country’s largest investor-owned utilities, serving parts of 11 states. The service territory covers 197,500 square miles in the Midwest, South and Southeast.

This electric utility began using EasyLobby during 2004. Two separate events prompted company management to adopt a professional visitor management system – the terrorists attack on 9/11 and the adoption of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. Because of both events, the utility decided that they needed to determine who was visiting certain levels of management and who was visiting their power generation facilities.

They began installation of EasyLobby with their office buildings, installing stations at their largest offices at first – about 10 buildings.

Their goal was to deploy a system at their business offices that would automate the check in process of visitors and improve security by knowing who was visiting the building and who they were visiting. They would also be able to generate reports on who was visiting various levels of management, thereby complying with one of the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

With requirements to comply with various regulations, and other security concerns in mind, they expanded their use of EasyLobby visitor management beyond their management offices.

Seeking to improve security at their generating facilities, the utility expanded the use of EasyLobby beyond office buildings. The first phase of the rollout to generating facilities included about 15 facilities. Others soon followed.

Visitor badges at this electric utility employ a consistent design across all facilities with a distinct color coding scheme which determines which visitors need to be escorted and who does not. This allows company personnel to easily identify visitors who should be escorted within their facilities. The clip-on badges include a color photo, a bar code for easy check out, and emergency contact information.

In addition to improving security, the utility also sought ways to implement cost savings with their use of EasyLobby. One of the major areas they were able to save expenses was the use of EasyLobby to badge contractors at generating facilities that had either planned or unplanned outages.

During times of facility outages, there can be five or six hundred to more than three thousand additional people who will be entering the plant to work on it. Before EasyLobby was installed they had no reliable mechanism for keeping track of who was there, how long they were there, and whether those individuals were also working at their other plants.

The result: EasyLobby has dramatically helped control the access of temporary visitors to their generating facilities during outages. This has helped them from a security perspective by knowing exactly who is in their facility. It has also helped save money by providing them with the ability to screen out undesirable temporary workers. They can now ‘flag’ specific workers as not being acceptable to work at any of their facilities.

In 2008 this utility began integrating EasyLobby with their access control system – General Electric’s Picture Perfect – to monitor and provide access to temporary visitors and workers during the outages. This integration allows the utility to generate security access badges to their visitors and contractors from their EasyLobby stations.

This utility is one of many electric utilities that are constantly looking to use EasyLobby to improve their security and business operations, to comply with regulatory policies, and to save money. As a result of EasyLobby, they are more efficient and able to better monitor and control the use of temporary contractors, and are able to implement better visitor security measures at all their facilities. As a result, their rate payers ultimately benefit.