Field maintenance

The fact that Telcred's solution works completely offline while being able to handle temporary access rights makes it very suitable for companies with geographically distributed infrastructure, for example companies in:

Such companies can have hundreds or thousands of sites spread out over a region or even an entire country. These sites need to be visited from time to time for upgrades, repairs, or planned maintenance. Today, access control is typically handled with traditional keys, which leads to several problems.

First, it is not unusual that maintenance technicians spend a considerable amount of their work hours picking up and returning keys. This is especially true in rural areas with long distances between offices where the keys are stored and the actual sites.

Second, large infrastructure companies can have tens of thousands of keys to manage, which inevitably leads to a situation where the right keys cannot be found when they are needed, while other keys are lost, stolen, or simply never returned. This is a severe security risk since traditional keys have an eternal lifespan until the lock cylinders are exchanged.

With Telcred, both of these problems are solved. Since access rights can be distributed over the air (or over the Internet in the case of contactless cards) there is no need for technicians to waste time on travel only to pick up and return keys. And since the access rights have a predefined validity period, after which they ar no longer usable, the situation with keys that are unaccounted for but still work does not occur.

Public buildings

For some public or semi-public buildings the access control situation is quite challenging with different tenants, personnel categories, many visitors, and so on. All of which should have different access rights. Examples include:

For most such buildings today, the access control system is typically only installed on entrance doors, while the doors inside the building are not locked at all or locked with traditional keys. However, with increasing demands on security this will change.

Telcred's system with offline operation and support for temporary access rights enables building owners to install access control throughout the premises, while keeping costs down. An interesting configuration for this type of buildings is to make the entrance doors online while interior doors are offline. This way, the entrance door can be used to write the current day's access rights to the card as the visitor passes the entrance door.

Home care

Key management is a big challenge for home care organizations. Care givers spend a considerable amount of time every day picking up and returning keys. Clients feel uncomfortable handing out keys to their home to strangers, while at the same time care givers feel uncomfortable being trusted with these keys, since they can be blamed if for example something is stolen.

With Telcred's solution there is no need for care givers to pass the office to pick up or return keys. Accesss rights that allow only the right person access to the right place during the time they should be there, and expire afterwards, can be sent directly to their phone instead.

With Telcred's solution it is also possible to redeploy people in real time in case of an emergency. If there is an alert from a client's safety alarm, the home care organization can send whoever happens to be nearby and provide them with the necessary access rights over the air without losing valuable time.

Transportation

The initial inspiration for Telcred's solution was how to handle access control for shipping containers. This is indeed a difficult challenge to solve with traditional approaches, since they are locked in one place and opened in another, potentially on the other side of the world.

Of course, with Telcred this is not a problem since the access rights are separated from the device used to open the container. When it arrives, the receiving party could notify the sender about this and also provide an identifier of the container, after which the sender can create the access rights and send them to the receiver's phone or smart card in a few seconds, even if they are on the other side of the world.

Theft and "shrinkage" from trucks is an increasing problem. In one scenario, the cargo space of a long-haul truck is locked with Telcred's solution. The driver is given an NFC phone which has been provisioned with Telcred's solution, but without access rights to open the carge space. When the driver arrives at the destination, or if he is stopped by police or customs, access rights can be sent to his phone in a few seconds. This way the truck remains locked during the entire transport, while the shipping company can always provide the driver with temporary rights to open the cargo space if necessary.