When a business calls us about access control, the conversation usually starts with a credential question: fob, card, or mobile app? It’s a fair question, and we’ll get to it — but at Client A, a 450,000+ sq ft industrial facility we worked with in Nampa, it wasn’t close to the first decision that mattered.
(Client name withheld pending a confidentiality review — the details below are from a real, completed IETEL project.)
The problem wasn’t the hardware
Client A needed centralized access control across dozens of entry points in a facility that size, and it needed to keep running the entire time we worked. This wasn’t a new building where you install a system before anyone moves in. It was a live, operating facility with its own schedules, its own traffic patterns, and its own existing infrastructure already in place. Whatever we designed had to work with that, not around it.
That’s the part a credential type doesn’t answer. Before you can decide what someone badges in with, you have to answer a longer list of questions:
- Who actually needs access, and to what?
- Which areas genuinely need to be controlled, versus which doors are fine left as they are?
- When should that access be valid — all hours, shift hours, something else?
- What happens the day someone leaves or changes roles?
- How fast can access be revoked if it needs to be?
- How does a new system coexist with a facility that’s already running?
- How do you install all of that without shutting the place down to do it?
Answer those, and the credential decision becomes one of the smaller choices in the project — not the whole project.
What we found walking the facility
At Client A’s scale, entry points aren’t uniform. Some doors are high-traffic and need something fast and low-friction. Others are rarely used and need to be secure more than they need to be convenient. Some already had wiring and infrastructure we could build on; others needed everything installed from scratch. None of that shows up on a floor plan — it shows up when you walk the building and look at how it’s actually used.
How we approached it
We assessed every entry point individually rather than applying one standard to the whole facility, then designed a unified smart-lock system built to integrate with Client A’s existing infrastructure instead of replacing it wholesale. Because the facility couldn’t pause operations for the install, we rolled it out in coordinated phases — enough at a time to make real progress, never so much at once that it disrupted the day-to-day work happening around it.
What we implemented
The finished system covers the facility with 29 smart locks across 14+ access points, plus 6 intercoms tied into the same system, running on Verkada AC42 access control panels. What used to be exposed, unlabeled wiring at the panel level is now enclosed and organized — the kind of detail that doesn’t affect how the system works today, but matters the first time someone has to service or expand it. Every system was live and online at handover.
What this means if you’re evaluating access control
If you’re sizing up access control for a facility of any real scale, don’t start the conversation with fob-versus-card-versus-mobile. Start with the questions above. The credential is what a person touches every day, so it matters — but it’s a decision you make after you know which doors need control, who needs through them, and how fast you need to be able to shut that access off. Get that part right, and the credential choice is usually straightforward.
If you’re working through that for your own facility, that’s the same process we’d start with on our access control services page.