The Challenge
With over 1100 employees, PEMCO Financial Services provides
one-stop insurance, banking, and other financial services to
over 630,000 customers through its subsidiaries PEMCO Insurance,
School Employees Credit Union of Washington and EvergreenBank.
PEMCO has sixteen offices across Washington state.
In 2003, PEMCO set out to implement digital video surveillance
and integrate existing access control and alarm systems with
video in order to gain dramatic improvements in its physical
securityÑat an economic cost. Eduard Telders, Security Manager
of PEMCO, contacted Vigilos to learn more about, Brightsite,
our turnkey security solution. PEMCO's Spokane, Washington
facility was selected as a good test of the benefits of Brightsite
because of the location's relatively modest security needs
and its distance from the Seattle headquarters.
The Solution
The Vigilos team educated the PEMCO security and information
technology (IT) staff about the benefits and key features of
Brightsite. At each remote office, appliances are connected
to the PEMCO local area network, the video cameras and access
control systems are connected to the appliances, a PEMCO technician
configures the software, and each system is typically running
in less than three hours.
The Seattle-based security staff instantly
had a wealth of additional information from the remote offices.
They now monitor
all sites remotely through Vigilos, using a mix of newly
installed and existing video cameras. When an alarm situation
occurs,
it triggers one of the rules that PEMCO created to mirror
its security policies. Immediately, both the local management
and
headquarters security staff is automatically notified. They
can respond by examining information about the situation,
viewing either live video or log video from the time of the
event.
As a result, they can react appropriately in a matter of
moments from miles away!
The Vigilos software was soon being deployed across the PEMCO
enterprise.
The Results: $2 million annual savings
With the Vigilos software installed, PEMCO gained digital
video surveillance capabilities and a lot more. Vigilos now
ties together video, access control, silent alarms, vault alarms,
and burglar alarms to create an enterprise security management
system, complete with automated notifications customized to
the alarm type and PEMCO's policies and procedures. PEMCO staff
in the headquarters in Seattle is even able to program and
control access at each site Ð enabling new employee access,
unlocking doors, and setting schedules all through the Vigilos
software.
Because the system is designed to allow access from
a variety of locations, PEMCO is able to use Seattle-based
security staff
to monitor and react to events in any location. They've created
rules that trigger responses that are tailored to the incident,
so security staff no longer wastes time on low-level activities
that aren't true security breaches. Instead, they concentrate
first on the incidents with the highest severity. As a result,
Telders was able to avoid hiring 13 officers to provide the
security he felt the company required.
PEMCO met its objectives,
and did so cost effectively.
"The Vigilos Enterprise Security Management software
helped us institute and maintain a set of common security
policies and 'best practices' that have helped drastically
improve security while saving nearly $2 million per year
in guard costs. As one indication of how well it works, crime
statistics provided to us by the Seattle Police Department indicate
that the area immediately surrounding our properties now
have a significantly lower rate of incidents than before
we implemented our security program using Vigilos." --
Ed Telders
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