SPOTLIGHT INSTITUTIONAL Master Keying Essentials: Part 3 Charles Cameron, CML, wraps up his three- part series on managing master key systems. that’s an unreasonable goal for a lot of reasons. From an economic and customer service perspective, I believe that two different key systems from different manufacturers keeps the companies and their distributors on their toes. That means two TMK’s. From a logistics perspective, it takes planning and time to rekey the existing locks or in- A stall new cylinders and issue the keys. So during the transition phase from old to new in a rekey, many employees will need more than one master key. Finally, from a financial perspective, most organizations aren’t able to handle the total cost of the upgrade in a single year and choose to do it over several years. Now we are up to three or four TMK’s, which is not an unreasonable number. In fact, it can offer the benefit of flexibility. When there is an issue with the keying of an area, the solution might be to move the new keying to one of the other existing systems. Plus, you should be able to offer quick turn- around because you should have spare cylinders and key bittings on hand and don’t have to wait on delivery from a supplier. A Step Further I like to take this multiple-key approach even further. Requiring two or three keys to accom- plish one’s needs allows for flexibility in keying. And, if one starts out with a single key, in my experience it pretty much guarantees that eventually additional keys will be necessary. I have had situations where, aſter “conveniently keying” a department on one key, I got a request to remove the copier room from the departmental key because Professor Z had been using the copier aſter hours to print copies of a book he is working on. The department doesn’t 12 KEYNOTES JULY 2014 s I mentioned in the previous installments of this article (Keynotes, May 2014, “Master Keying Essentials: Part 1,” p. 18; and Keynotes, June 2014, “Master Keying Essentials: Part 2,” p. 16), I have worked on three different cam- puses. None of them had a single unified master key system, and I am convinced have the money for a complete rekey and re- structuring the keying, so the solution is to key the copier room to a new separate key. Presto, one key has become two, and not even for the guy who caused the problem. Some see the solution as bumping the keys issued up a level, and many have done so. I see two problems with this. The first is that even if the person is completely honorable and never uses the key where he shouldn’t, this puts more keys in circulation that, if lost, puts a large number of areas at risk. The other problem is, believe it on not, there are those folks who figure that if they have a key that opens a space, that actually grants them permission to go in there whenever they want to. Wow! I have found that the typical academic de- partment wants their offices keyed different with a master key for the department chair or secretary. However, I have had a few de- partments that want all their offices keyed the same (keyed alike) to be able to cover for each other on shared responsibilities. In such cases I still key the offices different under a department master. The master is issued to the professors while offering the availability of an individual office key to issue to a stu- dent that is working with a specific professor. Justifying the Extra Key In academic buildings an example would be when professors would need two keys to access their office when the building is locked. One key would, of course, be for their office. The other key would be for the building entrance, which would also open the classrooms, lounges or other common areas in the building. The fact that the en- trance key opens other useful areas helps sell the acceptance of this “extra” key. With the bottom-up perspective when implementing a new master key system, I like to use a grand master key as the highest WWW.ALOA.ORG
