Finnish City Gym now Mobile-accessible

Municipalities in Finland often provide a variety of sports and leisure services for their residents. Automating access control is the easiest way for residents to enter such facilities.

Sipoo’s residents now can enter gym and ice swimming sites using only their mobile phones – and are reporting it as a positive experience. Previously residents used pin codes to enter facilities, but managers had learned it was no longer safe enough. Many pin codes were so old they had begun turning up in the hands of the wrong people. However, Ossi Hartikainen, Sipoo municipality’s technical property manager, points out, “You rarely give your phone to someone else, so access rights aren’t getting misused anymore”. He continues, “We don’t have to worry about lost access cards either, because it’s much easier to manage and distribute customers’ mobile IDs than physical access cards – we save work time, while lowering costs.”

Sipoo municipality was already using Megaflex system with Idesco mobile-compatible readers installed, so migrating to mobile access was quite simple.

Marko Lehtonen of Visma, Megaflex system provider, noted that, “Sipoo municipality’s Megaflex system handles about 100 000 access events per month for three hundred doors. A couple hundred mobile users access the gym and ice swimming places currently. Most of the door readers were already mobile-compatible, so it was an easy deployment.” He continues, “Additionally, since most of them are OSDP, they can be updated remotely. We are also saving time and lowering costs, because we no longer need to visit each reader individually with reader-specific configuration cards”.

Although Sipoo municipality had tested other mobile access options, Idesco’s solution proved the most cost-effective and easiest to deploy. New gym customers or ice swimmers get a registration request for their mobile ID directly from Megaflex system. Next, they install an app in their phones before registering their mobile ID. After that, they can enter whatever facilities they have registered for access.

Sipoo is already considering expanding mobile access to other facilities besides sports and leisure. Mobile IDs could also solve temporary, time-limited access privileges. For example, if freight carriers, food delivery or carpet service vendors need access to a facility, it is easiest to send their privileges directly to their mobile phones. It saves them time since they don’t need to retrieve a card first. Sipoo municipality’s Ossi Hartikainen adds, “We save costs too since we don’t need to purchase and program physical cards for their temporary use”.