The Crane Building + Doordeck: Streamlining Access For Smart Building Management

The Crane building is a multi-use commercial building situated in the heart of London’s bankside owned by Dorrington who acquired and refurbished the property in 2013/14. The building is made up of 7 floors, accommodating 5 companies and a flex workspace on the 4th floor. The building’s floors, accessible by two smart elevators or stairs, are characterised by open plan office spaces including private meeting room areas and kitchen facilities. On the basement level there is a gym which building members can use at their leisure and on the rooftop lies a communal roof garden.

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Why has Doordeck been adopted by the building?

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Dorrington decided on implementing Doordeck due to recommendations by trusted industry figures, a plethora of access control features and integrations and excellent customer and developer support. With other trusted access control companies not being London-based they were ruled out by Dorrington. In addition, the variety of unlocking methods (QR, in-app NFC, iOS/Android widgets) and the ability to integrate with the InterGate, the existing building experience app, sealed the deal.

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Rising costs and environmental concerns became a reason for change as well. Prior to installing Doordeck, plastic access cards were costing Dorrington £8 per card and with a high turnover of cards starting to become a problem as a result of them being lost, stolen or forgotten, this started to add up. Furthermore Dorrington wished to make a change to become more environmentally friendly, reducing single-use plastics, starting with key cards.

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How is Doordeck being used in the building?

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Doordeck is activated on 40 doors today in the Crane building with plans to add 10 more in the near future. More than 500 users are benefitting from mobile access, helping to improve building flow from reduced friction points in a high occupancy space.

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Using Doordeck’s open SDK solution, cloud-based mobile access was seamlessly  integrated into the Crane’s existing tenant experience platform, InterGate. Expanding its capabilities to accommodate mobile access and allow members to store their keys digitally. Now when a member uses their mobile NFC to unlock a door, they are automatically taken to the InterGate platform where they are able to access building information, support and communications, increasing building community and engagement. From a building management perspective, the integration allows for the platform to offer a complete centralised access management system, and improve communications with occupiers, Greg Sutcliffe, Managing Director of InterGate explains:

“Doordeck’s SDK integration with our InterGate app completes our ‘Single Pane of Glass’ solution. As an all-in-one solution that provides a best-in-class building management platform, having NFC mobile access control integrated with the InterGate app is critical to first-class user experience and visitor management. With Doordeck embedded in our app we can now provide room booking management and understand building and room usage across our clients’ portfolios.”

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Greg Sutcliffe, Managing Director & Owner, InterGate

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How has Doordeck Improved the user experience in The Crane Building?

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Members of the Crane are now able to carry their keys digitally and access doors securely through NFC smartphone entry via the InterGate platform. This means forgotten or lost keycards are a thing of the past for the Crane’s tenants, all keys are stored in the one place, their phone.

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For temporary and overseas visitors they can be granted digital access passes for a particular time and date. Using a QR code emailed to them they are able to access the doors granted to them within the timeframe. Once their time is up, access is revoked preventing any potential future breaches of security. This has become especially convenient for granting access to contractors that are working over the weekends, when there might not be on-site building staff.

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“With the addition of Doordeck to the Crane and its smooth integration with InterGate, our building app, we have been able to improve and modernise our member and visitor experience. We needed a solution to physical key cards that were being reissued on a daily basis by our receptionist staff, causing unnecessary work, costs, and security risk. Adopting a mobile solution was the answer and Doordeck with its ability to integrate with our app was ideal for us. Controlling user access remotely has been a game changer for building management and our front of house operations, alleviating problems with key storage and creating peace of mind from improved access control security. Engagement on our building experience platform has also increased as a result of the new mobile access capability, with users now required to access the app to activate their digital keys to unlock doors.”

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Connie Lester, Head of Corporate Operations, Dorrington

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Dorrington’s requirements to manage the Crane’s occupiers effectively has been made easier with the addition of Doordeck’s remote mobile access system. Doordeck’s cloud infrastructure creates a ‘Single Pane of Glass’ allowing the building operator to manage access permissions at the touch of a button for the building as well as the other sites they manage via any device, for example The Bindery, another London-based Dorrington site.

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In addition to this, unlocking data insights through cloud-based access control improves transparency in space utilisation in which the building manager can analyse and use to optimise how they wish.

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How will Doordeck help with the future of the site's usage?

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With 10 more doors on the way for the Crane, Doordeck can represent its ability to scale in no time, without disrupting the building’s infrastructure. All that is required is 10 more wireless stick-on custom tiles to be placed next to the new doors, these are then connected to the existing cloud-infrastructure which is already integrated with InterGate platform and it's done!

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"It’s been a pleasure to work in partnership with Intergate and Dorrington. Their commitment to innovation complements our vision of simplifying access management through award winning mobile access control that provides hassle-free digital visitor passes and digital keys for tenants and their employees and visitors.”

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Implement Doordeck today to save time and costs on your building operations whilst giving your members and visitors the ultimate mobile access experience.

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https://doordeck.com/contact-us

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