Facility Maintenance Decisions

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Unlocking the Door to Successful Door Security Upgradestest

By James Piper, P.E.

February 2015

A s the operations and security requirements of institutional and commercial facilities evolve, maintenance and engineering managers face challenges in determining which advances in security technology and door hardware best meet their facilities' needs.

To succeed, managers must select technology and hardware that strikes a balance among a number of issues, including security, ease of access and egress, ease of maintenance, compliance with regulations and standards, and appearance. Failure to balance these issues will result in a system that at best is difficult to use and at worst, ineffective, costly, and frequently overridden by users.

Before managers plan upgrades to their facilities' door security and hardware components, they first must understand their facilities' needs on an area-by-area basis. Not all areas or facilities require the same level of protection.

Similarly, not all areas within a given facility undergo the same level of wear and tear from use. It is also not possible to make a facility 100 percent secure. To do so most likely would make it unusable. It is far more effective to match the level of security to be implemented and the hardware's functionality being installed to meet the needs of the application.

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