Managing Visitors, Packages And Parking In A Multi-Tenant Residential Property By The Numbers:
Residential Units: 336
Visitors / Year: More than 20,000
Packages / Year: More than 5,000
Background And Initial Implementation
Plaza South Condominiums in Fort
Lauderdale, FL began searching in early
2004 for a ‘gatekeeper’ system to manage
security for their high-rise condominium
complex. According to Sue Blalock at Plaza
South, “We’re a large facility and we get
lots of visitors. The President of the
Association was seeking to upgrade the way
in which we handled visitors, and to
improve both our security and our image.”
“I was searching online for solutions and discovered EasyLobby. We signed up for a demo, ran the trial, and we liked what we saw. Even though we are a residential complex, we were particularly impressed with the many large companies who use EasyLobby.”
Managing Visitor Flow
Prior to the EasyLobby deployment, the
visitor log at Plaza South was kept in an
‘entirely hand-written’ fashion. Due to
increased visitor volume, as well as a
growing number of contractors and visitors
entering the facility for unit renovations,
there was a desire among both residents and
management to enhance the efficiency and
effectiveness of how visitors were managed,
and to do so in a way that maintains the
premium image of the complex.
While Plaza South only has 2 entrances, those entrances are extremely busy – more than 20,000 visitors entered the facility in 2008 alone. EasyLobby is deployed in 3 locations on site – at the front desk, the receiving area, and in the main office for administrative and reporting purposes.
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Beyond Visitor Management
Plaza South makes extensive use of
EasyLobby and has discovered numerous
ways to leverage the capabilities of the
product – using EasyLobby for a number of
applications beyond managing visitors.
According to Blalock, Package Management is a “major issue in such a large facility”, and EasyLobby has already labeled over 5,000 packages in 2008 alone. When a package arrives at the front desk, it is recorded in EasyLobby – with signature capture - and labeled for delivery to the proper unit and recipient. By using EasyLobby to track and label packages, the loss of packages between the front desk of the building and the final recipient has been dramatically reduced
Another use for EasyLobby is to keep track of visitor’s vehicles – for instance when there is an issue such as an improperlyparked car and the owner needs to be quickly located. In such a large complex, performing this task using the old ‘pencil and paper’ method was always extremely time-consuming, and frequently unsuccessful. With EasyLobby, the owner of any vehicle can almost always be found and contacted both quickly and easily.
In addition, Plaza South utilizes EasyLobby’s Asset Management capabilities to manage security tags and keys, which are frequently provided to contractors and other frequent visitors for the tower they are working in or visiting.
Keeping It Simple – Yet Powerful
One of the key reasons that EasyLobby has
been successful at Plaza South is that it
provides an ideal balance of power and
flexibility, yet at the same time is very easyto-
use.
“During the first few weeks of using EasyLobby we continued to run our ‘by hand’ guest books in parallel” said Blalock. “Our reason for doing this was that our security personnel were generally not adept with technology and we wanted to avoid errors. However, since it was so easy to customize EasyLobby and tailor it specifically for our needs, we found that we could move to a fully-automated solution very quickly.”
Leveraging The Investment
While Plaza South isn’t planning to
physically expand the facility, Blalock stated
that they are looking forward to finding new
ways to leverage their investment in
EasyLobby.
“Because EasyLobby has been so easy to work with – and because the application keeps improving and getting more powerful, we are sure we’ll continue to find many other ways to put it to use for our complex and our tenants.”
For More Infomation Or To Request A Demo
EasyLobby, Inc.
35 Highland Circle
Needham, MA 02494
(781) 455-8558
E-Mail: [email protected]
www.easylobby.com