Building a Commercial Security Training Wall for Scenario Testing

A customer, Rich, recently came to us with a problem. His access control environment has three generations of Software House’s access control boards as well as a fourth type of access control board, the Edge panel. Software House has done a good job of adding features as the boards have been upgraded over the years, but this means that the older boards do not have the same feature sets as the newer ones. Understanding the capabilities of each board is not always easy.

Rich also wanted to understand some of LifeSafety’s Power Supply features, something not currently being used in his environment.

He could have separated out seven or eight of the doors in his environment and used those for testing. However, testing in the production environment could have led to customer dissatisfaction (when things didn’t go as planned.) So, our best option was to build a training wall.

The Training Wall

Creating a training wall with four different boards and two doors per board would take up a lot of room and be fairly costly. We ended up creating two demonstration doors where they could be switched to one of the four access control boards. One of the doors we set up as fail-secure, meaning the door is still locked if power is removed. The other door was set up as fail-safe, meaning the door is unlocked when the power is removed. We did this to demonstrate the different ways of connecting the power supply and to provide a realistic scenario that might be found in the field.

Now, Rich has a way to test the different locking scenarios with the different feature sets of each board. Since two doors are connected to the boards, he can also test read in/read out, piggybacking, tail-gating, interlocked doors, and other scenarios involving more than one door. The training wall can also serve as a training area for new programmers, or new installation crews to show how the doors should be programmed or how the wires need to be connected.

We love unique challenges.

This certainly was a unique challenge for us. It’s the first time a customer has asked us to create a training wall for them. If you need a training wall or have another unique challenge, let us know! At Kenton Brothers, we embrace new challenges. Innovation is in our blood.