Competent Access

For many organizations, maintaining the health and safety of its workers is a core focus. For a workforce working in the resources, power generation, mining, manufacturing sectors to name but a few, workers should be protected by health and safety initiatives that minimize the risk of workers being harmed on the job.

A Physical Identity and Access Management (PIAM) solution can provide invaluable assistance in supporting these health and safety initiatives.

In these organizations, dangerous or hazardous areas are often secured, potentially using a standard physical access control system (PACS) or maybe even just lock and key or equivalent. The process to ensure that only authorized, competent, and trained people can get access to these areas is often manual, prone to delays and errors and can be easily disconnected from the process of granting the physical access to the hazardous areas.

Examples of this include getting access to a laboratory; to a confined area; working at heights; dangerous equipment requiring special knowledge to operate safely. This could also include having a medical certificate ensuring fitness for work, or having people subjected to drug and alcohol tests.

The ideal approach is to control access to the hazardous area through the PACS, and to manage the process of recording the status of people’s competency and training within a PIAM solution, leveraging the PIAM solution’s capability to manage the process of requesting and approving access, taking into account the competency status of the individual. The PIAM solution would be able to revoke access, should the individual’s training or competency no longer be valid.

In a perfect world, the PIAM solution is able to be integrated with external systems, such as a learning management system or medical system, to ensure that data is derived from the systems of record and applied in real-time.