With Eltron On-site Printer, St. John Fisher College Cuts Badge Preparation to Less than a Minute
09 June, 2003
category: Education
All on Rochester (NY) campus use badges – access to residence halls, computer rooms, meals, library and even the Buffalo Bills!
St. John Fisher College is the idyllic liberal arts college, with 18
buildings spread over 140 park-like acres. With 2,200 full-time and 1,000
part-time students, the college offers 27 academic liberal arts majors and
nine pre-professional programs. It also is committed to protecting students
and automating operations.
“We employ magnetic stripe badges for our students, faculty, alumni and
vendors,” reports Mike McCarthy, director of security for St. John Fisher
College. “The biggest reason we selected the Eltron printer was to cut down
on printing time. At orientation, when the students are lined up out the
door, we’ve substantially reduced the amount of time it takes to produce a
badge. Printing time has dropped from 3 to 3 1/2 minutes to less than one
minute with the Eltron printer.”
According to McCarthy, badges are used by all students, including the 1,200
on-campus students for access to their residence halls, which are locked
down 24/7, as well as the College’s computer rooms, which are locked after
hours. Faculty, staff, and students also use their badges in the meal
program, and students check out books at the library with their badges.
Badges for vendors are also printed.
“For example,” McCarthy explains, “a vendor may maintain washers and dryers
in residence halls each week. That person comes to us and picks up his
badge, which we keep in a lockbox. Once done, he returns his badge to us
and it is kept in the lockbox until needed the next time.”
Each summer, the campus becomes the training grounds for the NFL Buffalo
Bills football squad. Although the Bills already have their own ID cards,
St. John Fisher College prints up new badges, with special colors and codes,
for those authorized to access restricted areas such as the team’s locker
rooms, workout rooms and residences.
Interfaces to Identicard access control system
“Our primary goal was to help Fisher badge all students and staff while
assuring that the magnetic stripe badging system would interface with the
College’s Identicard access control system,” relates Terry Rivet, executive
vice president of Securitronics (Rochester), the integrator. “We also
needed to assure the printer would provide good quality images quickly and
be able to handle high traffic, high volume output. Often, many badges need
to be printed at once. Also, the printer needs to be used almost every day,
so it needed to be reliable.”
Rivet and McCarthy saw the Eltron P420 printer at the ASIS Conference in
Philadelphia in the fall of 2002. It appeared easier to use than their
previous printer and met their requirements. The College soon purchased it.
The standalone P420 dual-sided color printer encodes magnetic stripe cards
and prints sharp, readable ID photographs, graphics, and text edge-to-edge
in seconds. The reject hopper separates cards that fail encoding prior to
printing, saving valuable printer ribbon. The enclosure includes a viewing
window to monitor the printing process without opening the unit. The P420
printer ribbon synchronizes automatically, eliminating the need for operator
intervention. A self-cleaning cartridge thoroughly removes dust before
printing, eliminating card rejects due to dust contamination.
“It takes very little time to learn how to operate the printer, less than 15
minutes,” McCarthy says.
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Zebra Eltron – 1001 Flynn Road-Camarillo, Calif. 93012-8706 – Phone
805.579.1800 – website www.eltroncards.com
Mike McCarthy
Director of Security, St. John Fisher College
585-385-7315
[email protected]
Terry Rivet
Executive Vice President, Securitronics
585-256-6243
[email protected]
