The Importance of Physical Key Management

It may seem obvious, but if physical keys give access to your organization’s important spaces, assets, and people, they should get just as much protection as those spaces, assets, and people. 

Key management systems keep your employees accountable for key use. Supervisors won’t waste time hunting down missing keys. The key system will always have an accurate record of which ones are where. Key losses will drop and so will rekeying costs. 

Key management systems generate detailed transaction logs automatically, so you’ll have an airtight record of who used which keys and when. Staff members are fully accountable for keys in their possession. 

Key trackers also offer better control over repeatable processes, a core tenet of Lean business management. Lean is a popular set of management practices whose use is shown to improve efficiency and eliminate waste. The methodology originated in the manufacturing sector but today is popular across industries. 

The core principle of Lean is to reduce and eliminate variance and non-value-adding activities. Ideally, you want as many business processes as possible to be standardized, repeatable, error-free and shown to add value for your company or your customers. Therefore, identifying processes you can automate is a common task under Lean. 

RTNHub lets you set sign-out curfews on keys. Some of our customers use this feature to tie it to a shift schedule, like 8:00 am to 5:00 pm, to help ensure staff members don’t accidentally take keys home. But we helped one pharmaceutical manufacturer solve a unique challenge using a different kind of key curfew. 

They had large, locking freezers that held temperature-sensitive medicine valued at millions of dollars per bag. If the freezers were left open, the medicine would degrade. So we helped them deploy a key curfew system with 15-minute timers. Staff assigned to check freezers needed to use and return keys promptly, or supervisors would be alerted to the personnel and the freezer in question. 

A tech company came to us when they found out KeyTracer would allow their managers to grant one-time key access to temporary or rotating workers, like their outsourced cleaning staff. A contracted worker had previously snapped a phone pic of a prototype held in a locked office and leaked it on social media. 

Since that worker only had to grab a key from a manual key pegboard system with no oversight, the company could not identify which individual had leaked their product or even which night the photo was taken. Efficiently logging one-time key access would keep cleaners working and accountable. 

A large telecom purchased KeyTracer systems for all of their facilities specifically to use the fleet key management module in RTNHub that integrated with their trucks’ onboard telematics GPS units. They were looking for more live fleet data. They suspected they could run their fleet more efficiently but weren’t sure exactly how. 

We also helped them program vehicle fault codes into the authentication panel so drivers could log service notes for mechanics when they returned keys. At some of their sites, we even enabled rotating key unlocks. It turned out some of their crew were used to taking the same truck repeatedly, racking up the miles, while other trucks sat in the lot for weeks at a time. This automatic rotation spread out the wear and tear across every vehicle in their fleet. 

In certain jurisdictions, employees must maintain a safety certification to operate warehouse forklifts. Non-compliance can result in severe penalties for the employee and the business. 

So, much like KeyTracer can lock out vehicle keys for employees with expired driver’s licenses, we modified this customer’s KeyTracer installation so that forklift keys would not unlock for employees with expired safety certifications. This protected everyone and automated one of their time-consuming certification monitoring jobs.