Radisson
Access Control from Kronos meets security needs of Radisson Edwardian Group
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Excellent customer service is a key differentiator between hotels, and key to delivering excellent service is the quality and commitment of the staff working across the 13 luxury hotels in the Radisson Edwardian group. The group therefore works hard to ensure that only authorised, trained personnel have access to each hotel and its guests. And with 1,500 employees and many starters and leavers every week, the group must ensure that controlling access to the group of hotels is slick and problem-free and that the administration around leavers and new starters is fast and efficient.
It's here, in the area of access control that the Radisson Edwardian uses the Kronos Efficient Access access control solution, with all 1,500 employees, right up to the senior management, using a Kronos ID card every time they enter or leave the hotel.
Kronos has been deployed across 11 of the group's 13 hotels since May 2008. Darren Carter, group Security Manager for Radisson Edwardian comments, "Our previous access system gave us very little in the way of management information or audit trail, so it was definitely time to move on. Kronos gives us peace of mind that access to our hotels is carefully controlled, with the additional benefit of providing comprehensive management information and a full audit trail of every time the system has been accessed and by whom."
All employees have been allocated a Kronos card and unique pin number to gain access through the staff entrance at the hotel in which they work. Although staff are given access rights to most areas of each hotel, Kronos can also group employees and personalise access rights to individuals or groups to ensure that only named individuals have access to areas such as stock holding facilities, IT suites and Head Office areas. These access rights and groups can be set up centrally on the Kronos system, so there is no need to make the changes to individual cards. Employees are required to carry their photo ID card with them at all times whilst on the premises. Previously there was no means to verify the identity of individuals if challenged on site – and the group’s business model encourages the migration of staff at all levels across the business therefore new faces are a daily feature within each hotel.
Health and Safety compliance is also easier to manage with the real-time availability of data through Kronos, which records an employee entering or leaving a building the moment it happens. In the event of a hotel being evacuated, a full list of employees in the building can be taken from Kronos immediately for roll call purposes.
Contractor rules too can be managed through Kronos. Darren Carter explains, "Every hotel has a number of contractors working for varying lengths of time, from one day to several weeks. This could be time consuming to manage, but Kronos allows us to set up expiry dates for cards to stop working on the last day of a fixed-time contract. This ensures that we don’t overlook any contractor and most importantly ensures that access is denied to personnel once a contract has ended."
Radisson Edwardian, similar to all large hotel groups in London, experiences a high turnover of staff and, although much lower than the industry average, this presents the group with a number of challenges to The task of adding so many employees to the HR system and creating new security cards could be time consuming for the security team, but is managed efficiently using Kronos. Once personnel records are created in the hotel's HR system, an automatic feed is sent through to Kronos and picked up by the security team on a Monday morning, when new access control cards are created for all new starters. Similarly with leavers, once the HR team has registered a leaver in the HR system, Kronos is immediately alerted and the employee’s access rights are terminated.
Darren Carter says, "One of the main advantages of Kronos is that the system does exactly what it's required to do with the minimum amount of supervision, controlling access to all hotels and allowing us to regulate who can go where and when. In an extremely busy hotel security environment Kronos is invaluable allowing us to manage a wide range of group-wide security issues without the additional burden of the day-to-day administration around employee access."
Access to Kronos is limited to the HR team, hotel security and technical staff, and each group has its own rights within the system to define who can see, modify and alter information and rules. The benefit of web-based access control is that authorized users can access Kronos through a simple and intuitive web interface and from any location – particularly useful at the Radisson Edwardian group where the security team can be working at any one of the group’s 13 hotels.
Kronos Efficient Access is an integrated component of Kronos Workforce Central Suite and, although the Radisson Edwardian group uses the system only for access control, many other organisations integrate systems and use Kronos to monitor and manage staff time and attendance and rostering.
Future plans at the Radisson Edwardian include growing the system to include expansion of the system within current installations and to accommodate new hotels being added the group in the near future.
About Radisson Edwardian
Radisson Edwardian is one of the UK's largest, privately owned hotel groups with a 13 luxury hotels across London, Heathrow and Manchester. The Group prides itself in its commitment to service excellence.