26 Jul 2010
The power of security
Security is a top priority at the Swedish power company, Svenska Kraftnät. ARX was therefore the natural choice for an access control system.
Svenska Kraftnät runs and manages the national grid – and monitors Sweden's electrical system. Both the power supply and the grid are crucial for Swedish society to function.
About 140 points can be counted on the map of the grid, many of which are power stations. About forty of the points represent transformer and connection stations for which Svenska Kraftnät is responsible.
Today all of these transformer and connection stations use ARX as the common access control system, following an extensive upgrade in late 2008 carried out together with Swesafe.
During a strong expansion a few years earlier, Svenska Kraftnät grew from 140 to 300 employees, in just a few years.
“You could say we exploded,” says Lars Johanson, Director of Security at Svenska Kraftnät. “We became too large for RiTA. In addition, the system was old and not adapted to a geographic distribution area as large as ours. The solution was to upgrade RiTA to ARX.
“It’s a cost-effective investment, since you can keep the existing system products that already belong to the door environment. Readers, locks, and door control devices work as well in ARX as in RiTA,” says Peter Bergström, product manager for Access control systems, ASSA.
ARX also offers the option of centralized administration for physically scattered systems, standard interfaces for integration with other systems, and functionality for ASSA’s intelligent door environments Hi-O.
The new system has worked really well, according to Lars Johanson:
“We can conclude that the supplier's reassurances about ARX were correct.”
In early 2009, when the 45 stations and 40 technology sheds were done, the next ARX challenge came along: Svenska Kraftnät’s new headquarters in Sundbyberg.
“We are now merging the two ARX systems so that we get one personal database, which allows us to work even more efficiently and with a better overview.”