National College for High Speed Rail Fast Tracks Improved Levels of Visitor Management with Solution from Sign In App

The National College for High Speed Rail is the largest of five new national colleges created by the Government to ensure British workers can learn world-class skills. With state of the art campuses in Birmingham and Doncaster, the College has been set up to provide training and work experience to learners aged 18 and above in all aspect of high speed rail including engineering, digital design, communications, project management and leadership.

The College opened to learners and the general public in September 2017, with 100 learners training across both campuses in the first academic year. This number is set to grow substantially, with 400 learners expected to enrol at the College over the next academic year.

Within the first few months of opening, the College was utilising a pen and paper system to try to keep track of learners, staff and visitors, but not only was this an unreliable method – with paperwork frequently lost – it was also not GDPR compliant. Therefore, with the GDPR deadline looming, the College urgently required a compliant solution for all personnel that was reliable, easy and intuitive to use and would also create a great first impression upon arrival.

With the Sign In App solution, GDPR readiness is built in with pin-code protection that can be added to the system, restricting public visibility of who is on site, their names or photo, as there is no legitimate business need for them to have access to this information. Furthermore, there is also the ability to delete visitor sign-in information immediately after that person signs out of the building – another step towards GDPR compliance.

Another one of the main drivers for the College in seeking a visitor management solution was the health and safety aspect, particularly due to the size of the institution. Although the campuses are primarily education environments, they also host conferencing facilities at both sites so there can be up to 200 visitors at any time, in addition to the learners. Safety is therefore paramount for the College, so the Sign In App functionality that can generate a live list of all personnel on site from any internet-connected device was an ideal solution for this challenge.

The College decided to deploy three Sign In App units at each campus, used by learners, teaching staff, contractors and visitors. Daryl Unitt, Head of ICT and Facilities at the National College for High Speed Rail, comments: “The roll-out and implementation were easy and absolutely no training was needed as the technology is very intuitive. Our IT department was able to quickly configure and hand it over to our reception team, with both campuses up and running within a day and a half – so it was a really rapid deployment from delivery.”

The future vision for the College is to expand throughout different locations in the UK, starting with a new training facility in Widnes, so it therefore required a scalable solution that could be easily deployed at additional campuses or training centres when applicable. Daryl continues: “Sign In App provided a perfect solution as it offers a simple multi-site licensing solution and with the continued development to the solution, delivering regular updates, we’re confident that it is future-proof too.”

Dan Harding, Director, Sign In App comments: “Working with the team at National College for High Speed Rail has been a great project to supply a solution that suits a number of different personnel and requirements. With continued expansion across the UK, we’re looking forward to working more with the College for future Sign In App deployments.”

Daryl concludes: “It’s been a really positive experience working with Sign In App that’s delivered an ideal solution, and continues to innovate on that product. We’ll definitely be looking to work with them again as we expand the College into more areas around the country.”