Andrew Tullie saw the expansion as an opportunity to use the very latest technology to find both water and energy usage and other operational efficiencies and tighten security right across the whole business. Selecting Traka Automotive key management to replace a different vendor’s ageing key management system, became a key part of a plan to find operational efficiencies and enhance physical security site-wide.
A total of five Traka Automotive cabinets were installed with a total capacity for 1,290 sets of keys: a 360-slot key cabinet was installed in the new Valet Bay; plus, the Soper Select showroom and body shop also had a 360-slot system installed.
The main workshop for servicing and PDI of new vehicles situated behind the BMW showroom required a further 360 slot double cabinet. A 180-slot cabinet was fitted inside the extended and refurbished MINI sales centre; whilst a 30 slot S-Series cabinet was installed in the office serving the Wash Bay.
Keys were secured and tracked for the first time in the service centre and keys for the buildings themselves were also now allocated double-lockable slots within relevant Traka key cabinets.
Within three months of installation all five cabinets are operating close to capacity. The newly fitted cabinets in BMW Soper’s busy Service Centre, with capacity for 360 iFob slots, have seen a total of 36,536 key movements in an out of the two cabinets there in the first three months of use. That’s an average of more than 500 key movements per working day across a workshop that sees over 50 cars on and off the bays every day.
The newly refurbished MINI dealership saw 11,139 key movements through its new Traka Automotive key cabinets in the first two months of usage across its 360 iFob slot capacity cabinets which were installed a month later at the start of August 2019. All five cabinets offering 1,290 iFob slot capacity together saw 79,542 key movements from a total of 114 authorised users. A total of 4,635 new sets of car keys have been assigned to the system as a whole during the first quarter of usage. Only five of these users regularly access Traka Automotive via a networked desktop PC. The rest access it via Traka’s mobile app from their mobile devices.