Easily managing remote sites and workers

Created in 2014, the municipal water authority of Valence provides safe drinking water to 65,000 residents of this city in south-eastern France. Eau de Valence manages 4 boreholes on the city outskirts, a storage unit with a capacity of 1,780 m2 and 300 km of water pipes.During an asset transfer from a previous operator, several keys were misplaced. Eau de Valence’s main requirements for a new, upgraded locking system were:

Secure access control that could protect widely dispersed water utility sites from unauthorised intrusion, and the resulting degradation of assets
The ability to trace workers’ and contractors’ access history by generating lock-bylock audit trails on demand from a central control panel
The convenience of issuing one single programmable key per user
Locking technology that could handle the deployment of mechanical and electronic locks in the same system

Adaptable electronic access control for demanding environment

Eau de Valence chose PROTEC2 CLIQ key-based access control with mechanical disc cylinders and encrypted electronics managed with a web based software — a technology already proven and trusted at critical infrastructure sites all over Europe.

With CLIQ, power to a cylinder is supplied by a standard battery inside every CLIQ key, so no wiring is required — making it an ideal retrofit solution at sites where mains electricity is difficult or impossible. With weatherproofed locks and padlocks, CLIQ can lock almost any opening, making it much more adaptable than other electronic access control systems.

Comprehensive audit trails for every cylinder, padlock and key are available on demand, so monitoring the frequency of contractor and other keyholder visits is easy. It’s also simple to limit any user’s access permissions to precise time periods. Weekly mandatory key revalidation provides yet another layer of security.

“After we chose PROTEC2 CLIQ key-based access management system, both the electronic and mechanical cylinders are now managed by the same key.”Christophe Nublat, Head of Study & Works Division Eau de Valence

Benefits of Abloy's solution

No wiring is required
More adaptable electronic access control systems
Easier to monitor keyholder visits and control access permissions