Challenge
A manufacturer’s physical access control system had reached the end of its life across two production sites covering 900+ staff, personnel doors, turnstiles and vehicle barriers. The estate ran continuously, so the replacement could not be approached as a maintenance window: a gap in coverage is a security incident, and an error in permissions is an employee who cannot reach their workplace at the start of a shift. Access rights had also accumulated over years of ad-hoc changes, with no reliable mapping between what a person did and what they could open.
Solution
- Planned and led the migration between system generations across both sites, sequencing the cutover so that neither production nor site security was interrupted.
- Rebuilt the access matrix from first principles rather than copying the legacy permissions forward — deriving rights from actual roles and areas instead of inherited exceptions.
- Tied access provisioning to HR processes, so joining, moving and leaving drive permissions rather than one-off requests to the IT team.
- Delivered working-time reporting for HR from the access data, replacing manual collection.
- Documented operating procedures and verification routines so the system can be run and audited by the in-house team.
Result
Both sites moved onto the current-generation platform without halting production and without a lapse in physical security. Access rights are now derived from a person’s role and maintained through the HR process instead of accumulating as manual exceptions, and HR receives working-time reporting directly from the system.