CUSTOMER CASEFor a water utility, CLIQ makes it easy to manage remote sites and workers

For a water utility, CLIQ makes it easy to manage remote sites and workers

2023-08-08

1 min read

Challenge

Created in 2014, the municipal water authority of Valence provides safe drinking water to 65,000 residents of this city in south-eastern France. Eau de Valence manages 4 boreholes on the city outskirts, a storage unit with a capacity of 1,780 m2 and 300 km of water pipes. During an asset transfer from a previous operator, several keys were misplaced.

Eau de Valence’s main requirements for a new, upgraded locking system were:

Secure access control that could protect widely dispersed water utility sites from unauthorised intrusion, and the resulting degradation of assets
The ability to trace workers’ and contractors’ access history by generating lock-bylock audit trails on demand from a central control panel
The convenience of issuing one single programmable key per user
Locking technology that could handle the deployment of mechanical and electronic locks in the same system

Solution

Eau de Valence chose PROTEC2 CLIQ key-based access control with mechanical disc cylinders and encrypted electronics managed with a web based software — a technology already proven and trusted at critical infrastructure sites all over Europe.

With CLIQ , power to a cylinder is supplied by a standard battery inside every CLIQ key, so no wiring is required — making it an ideal retrofit solution at sites where mains electricity is difficult or impossible. With weather-proofed locks and padlocks, CLIQ can lock almost any opening, making it much more adaptable than other electronic access control systems.

“The electronic and mechanical cylinders are managed by the same key”, says Christophe Nublat, Head of Study & Works Division Eau de Valence. Comprehensive audit trails for every cylinder, padlock and key are available on demand, so monitoring the frequency of contractor and other keyholder visits is easy. It’s also simple to limit any user’s access permissions to precise time periods. Weekly mandatory key revalidation provides yet another layer of security.

Five Eau de Valence keys are equipped with CLIQ Connect technology, so supervisors can update access rights of workers on the move, via Bluetooth and the CLIQ Connect app, if a problem arises when they’re away from base.