The True Cost of Poor Key Management

These days, when you invest in a master key system, you expect it to be able to grow along with your organization for years to come. And, with a reliable key management program in place, it certainly can.

But if key management is poor, there are significant consequences that affect not only your building’s security, but your bottom line. Here are five we’ve identified (and one easy way to address them).

Expense of rekeying locks

There’s one thing for certain: when keys are unaccounted for, rekeying locks is expensive.

• A few years ago, the College of William and Mary in Virginia paid more than $500,000 to replace keys and lock cores in multiple campus buildings after its set of master keys went missing.

• The State of Hawaii recently rekeyed its entire state Capitol at the cost of more than $250,000 because security leaders realized they didn’t know how many master keys were in circulation.

In addition to the hard cost of replacing keys and cylinders, a rekeying project requires an extensive time commitment and diverts staff away from other projects. During the rekeying process, high-security areas may require guards to be posted which can necessitate overtime or contracted security labor. In addition, administrators face the burden of having to inventory and distribute new keys to all employees.

Lost productivity and revenue

All of the time employees spend searching for missing keys or waiting for keys to access a space, use a vehicle, or retrieve equipment is time not spent on revenue-generating activities.

For example, at the start of each shift, employees of a multi-billion-dollar retailer were required to stand in line – sometimes for as long as 15 minutes – waiting for their manager to hand them the keys they needed to access the electronics or jewelry department, or other secured areas of the store. When the retailer analyzed this process, they discovered that each employee lost several hours of productivity each month – hours for which they were being paid but weren’t generating sales revenue. They addressed this issue by installing one simple solution.

Risk to unsecured spaces and assets

Yes, the cost of rekeying locks is a significant investment, but, if a key is misplaced, all the assets and spaces that key provides access to is at risk of being stolen or infiltrated.

Loss of peace of mind

Unfortunately, administrators cannot reliably track mechanical keys after they have been distributed – and one never knows if someone has duplicated a key or lost a key and not reported it. If you’re losing sleep worrying about these issues, that’s certainly a downside to poor key management. Intelligent keys are one solution to this problem simply because they cannot be duplicated and, if misplaced or lost, they can quickly be deactivated.

Disruption to the organization

Consider the Hawaiian Capitol building and college that had to rekey all of its locks. Even if each organization was using cylinders with interchangeable cores, it probably took weeks and possibly months to replace cores in every lock. How does one even begin to quantify that cost to the organization?

One key control system addresses all of these issue, especially when used in conjunction with a key management software like SimpleK.

Medeco’s Intelligent Key Cabinet (IKC) is an electronically controlled steel cabinet that is used to store and track both mechanical and intelligent keys. The IKC restricts access only to authorized personnel by way of a required PIN, biometric fingerprint or prox card authentication. And, with IKC, key control is delegated to the individual, so employees never have to wait for a manager when removing or returning keys.

And the best part about it is that the cabinet records when keys were taken and by whom, so a comprehensive audit trail is always available.

While the true cost of poor key management is difficult to calculate, with one simple solution, you can eliminate many of these pain points and quickly take your key management process to the next level.

Interested in learning more about how key management is made easy with the Intelligent Key Cabinet? Get in touch with our sales team by filling out the form below, and check out our brochure here.