Stories from the heart of Switzerland: Lucerne relies on electronic security solutions
The city. The lake. The mountains - These three attributes are probably the most closely associated with Lucerne as a social and cultural heart of central Switzerland. In addition to the picturesque location on Lake Lucerne and its proximity to the Alps, Lucerne also owes its status as an important tourism destination due to numerous attractions. To ensure that this remains the case for a long time, the city is investing in modern electronic locking system solutions to adequately protect its entire building stock.
Barbara Bissig, head of the Lucerne City Management & Operations department, reports in our blog on the first concrete implementation as part of the modernisation of two large school facilities and a plant yard.
"We are in a similar position to other cities with a large listed real estate portfolio: In most cases, these buildings are still operated with outdated, mechanical locking systems, which are only futureproof to a limited extent and sometimes require very complicated management. This is no longer up-to-date and does not meet the current and future requirements for secure and completely reliable access solutions", Barbara Bissig explains as the starting point. Many of the buildings in the Lucerne urban area, especially public institutions such as school facilities, are also regularly frequented by various user groups, including numerous sports or music clubs. The department manager also wanted to manage their access authorisations securely and conveniently in the future.
A single key for everything
The city of Lucerne relies on ASSA ABLOY's innovative eCLIQ electronic locking system, among other things. The uncomplicated solution, consisting of a few components from the CLIQ family, reliably protects against unauthorised access or theft and can also be used so flexibly that individual access authorisations can be assigned, changed and deleted for each key. Barbara Bissig was already able to get a precise picture of the advantages of the innovative locking system as part of the modernisation of a smaller factory yard and the new equipment for the two school facilities in Schaffeln and Grenzhof: "I have been completely won over by eCLIQ. Until now, the person responsible for key management had to be on site to programme a key in or out. A very time-consuming job that is a thing of the past thanks to the switch to eCLIQ. Now my team and I can manage practically 772 door cylinders, 728 keys and all access authorisations of 346 employees involved conveniently from home with a master key."
Before that stage was reached, however, there were some complex coordination processes that had to be solved. It is important to note that the City of Lucerne's IT security strategy generally does not allow the integration of available cloud-based software solutions from service providers and partners for data protection reasons. The comprehensive integration of the new systems into the city's IT management system was therefore extremely complex after the comparatively uncomplicated installation of the eCLIQ locking cylinders. Barbara Bissig also remembers this phase: "Our project partners at ASSA ABLOY have been providing excellent support from the very beginning and have successfully mastered every internal commissioning challenge to date."
Further projects in planning
Good cooperation is one of the reasons why the city of Lucerne is considering converting other projects to CLIQ technology. "ASSA ABLOY's technology is also ideally suited to modernising our entire listed buildings, as the historic doors do not need to be rewired, i.e. processed invasively."
Pictures by Joël Tattamanti