The desire of modern organizations to maximize the optimization of work processes has given rise to the development of various technologies.
One of these solutions was systems that help control visitors and manage flows in the enterprise.
What Is VMS
Companies use visitor management software to keep track of visitors to a company or event. Some solutions offer only statistical data, such as the number of visitors and visits, but need to contain detailed information about the visitor himself. At the same time, when reading a badge, other programs can show basic information about the person: full name, company, and purpose of visit.
The visitor management system helps create and print badges, collect information about registrants, track the frequency of visits, time spent in a company or at an event, and specific stands visited if badge reading devices are near the shelves. These visitors can be automatically sent additional information about the event. Programs that help manage visitors are a modern replacement for guest books.
Who Needs This Solution
Solutions for registration and management of visitor flows are especially relevant for business centers, industrial enterprises, and transport infrastructure facilities. They allow you to separate the flow of visitors, employees of tenant companies, management company personnel in business centers, employees, contractors, and clients in enterprises and transport facilities.
In today’s realities, we can safely state that a facility with any number of visitors can be provided with registration and visitor management software. We have all witnessed a period of pandemic when this was vitally necessary. And there are many such examples: sporting events, children’s parties, public meetings, etc. Moreover, these are examples not related to production.
Think about how much time employees at the checkpoints at the entrance to a large plant spend queuing at the turnstile. When using registration and flow management systems, all these problems disappear.
Functions of Visitor Management Systems
The capabilities of different software and technical solutions vary significantly. In addition, some developers offer flexible customization of the system’s functionality to suit your company’s needs. Here is an example of the capabilities that visitor management features. Now, let’s look at what a sound system should do to ensure the smooth running of an organization.
- The function of scanning and recognizing documents and checking their authenticity.
- Automatic filling of forms with data during registration.
- Providing visitor data in real-time: name of each visitor, the company’s industry in which they work, location, and complete contact information are displayed.
- Registration, tracking of visitors, printing of passes.
- Statistics: compiling reports based on visit data.
- Automation of the administrator’s workplace: the process from searching for an application to issuing a finished pass.
- Self-check-in terminal solutions: a self-service terminal will relieve employees and speed up check-in during peak hours.
Benefits of the System Integration
Software and hardware systems for automating registration and visitor service are equally valuable for the institution’s owners and visitors. However, this is where the main insidious danger of this area lies. The devices and systems themselves, the principles of their operation, must be reliable, extremely friendly, and understandable to any category of visitors and must have both organizational and technical options for duplication and switching to manual mode. The absence of the above traditionally leads to strong dissatisfaction among visitors, loss of prestige, and demand for the host organization.
Visitor flow management solutions allow you to automate the process, increasing the efficiency of registration and identification. This functionality of the access control system is necessary for extensive facilities with an intense flow of visitors since organizing the pass office’s work is possible.
An example is industrial facilities. If the process of managing the flow of visitors is not organized correctly, trucks may accumulate in parking lots. It leads to additional costs due to delays in partners’ transport and the need to allocate more parking space. In the case of business centers, effective organization of managing the flow of visitors can positively affect the facility’s image: long queues at the entrance reduce the attractiveness of the business center for tenant companies.
Systems for registering and managing visitor flows allow you to automate registration processes, obtain detailed information, and track visit statistics.
In addition, modern solutions help optimize the flow of visitors throughout the organization and routing with an arbitrary number of stages. Ultimately, the visitor sign-in app can analyze the accumulated information to balance the load on departments and employees and improve the organization’s business processes.
Perspectives and Tendencies
Today, systems are in demand that maximally consider the needs of all categories of counterparties of enterprises and organizations. They need to have a division into contractors, suppliers, buyers, tenants, and their employees so that drivers can register, with all data about transport and cargo automatically entered.
Customers want maximum integration of the pass ordering system with access control systems and the economic systems of enterprises (warehouse accounting, inventory movement accounting, personnel accounting, tenants, contractors) and with video surveillance systems, video analytics, and instruction.
Automatically collected data about a person should be transferred to all related systems, eliminating data collection and verification duplication in different departments of enterprises and organizations.
The next trend: customers want to provide contractors, suppliers, and customers with personal accounts for them to independently enter their employees and drivers so that the data of these categories of future visitors will automatically undergo checks against black and gray lists, after which responsible employees will approve them and only after that – pass offices and self-registration terminals. Naturally, all actions of these counterparties in the system must be saved, and all alarming incidents must be processed. Customers also want to configure the system and install additional modules independently. In a word, have a convenient designer to suit your needs.
Conclusion
Controlling and organizing an adequate flow of visitors is an essential area of improving the quality of service. Potential users of such solutions can be considered any objects with a large permanent or temporary flow of visitors, open areas providing various events, hospitals, educational institutions, IT clusters, industrial facilities, industrial parks, administrative complexes, etc.
