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The Importance of Vendor and Contractor Management for Casinos

by Paul Kazlauskas

Visitor Management Systems (VMS) are an electronic version of the visitor sign-in sheet or visitor log book that is commonly used at many facilities. Electronic visitor management systems make the visitor sign-in process more efficient and provide an improved ability to track visitors. While casinos may not document guests that are there to gamble, there are different types of visitors to casinos that should be documented and tracked: vendors and contractors.

Casinos are under operation 24/7, with vendors and contractors coming at all times of the day and night. They come to the casino campus to work with casino employees, fix mechanical devices, or are part of an entertainer’s entourage. Their presence should have a record for security and liability purposes. They should also be badged and identified (including casino employees who forget their employee badge) to increase facility security.

For the safety of their guests and employees, casinos have a responsibility to document any vendor or contractor that comes to their casino campus and have a record of when any given person left the property. Here are some benefits to managing vendors and contractors:

Know which vendors and contractors are in any of your buildings at any day or time.
A critical component to a visitor management system, and a major reason why they are an upgrade over manual sign-in books, is the ability to analyze visitor data electronically. There is a data record in the system for every logged visitor that has ever been to a facility, and that data can be mined to identify trends. Visitor data reports can be produced for any date range with a few simple clicks. If a security incident occurs, you’ll know exactly who was in the building at that time by accessing the visitor data reports.

Standardize the way you register your vendors and contractors.
A visitor management system allows your casino to capture the driver’s license information of every vendor and contractor. Using a driver’s license reader to scan the visitor’s I.D. captures the pertinent driver’s license information in seconds and allows you to uniformly capture critical information of every person in a mistake-proof manner. You won’t ever have to decipher handwriting, and every visitor’s information will be documented consistently. The system can also be used to create and maintain a contact database.

Print a professional-looking visitor badge that includes critical information.
A crisp, clean visitor badge shows your casino cares about security. The visitor pass should never be wrinkled or scribbled so it’s unreadable. A visitor badge imprinted with your casino’s logo deters forgery and promotes your facility’s identity. If you see someone wearing a plain badge that doesn’t have your casino’s name on it, they should be questioned.

Many facilities are taking the security of their visitor badges even further by using time-expiring badges, which change color overnight to prevent reuse. These visitor passes provide an excellent visual indicator that a visitor’s stay may be over and their presence should be questioned.

If a camera is in use with the visitor management system, a photo can be added to the visitor badge for further visual identification. Electronic visitor management system photos can also be used in investigating security breaches, even used to compare with security camera footage to further identify any person. Video cameras are everywhere in casinos so the presence of a visitor badge on a person captured on video surveillance is further evidence the person has been registered.

One other HUGE benefit that is often overlooked: electronic visitor management systems save money in the long term for these three reasons:

1. Electronic documentation of contractors allows for accurate tracking of third-party providers and cuts down on dishonest billing.
When managing a casino, many times working with contractors comes with an element of trust. If you don't have an electronic visitor management system, you essentially trust your contractors to bill you correctly. However, using your visitor management system, you can track exactly when your contractors began and ended work because you know when they arrived and departed. The system acts as a fool-proof time check for contractors (and vendors) to know how long they were there and if they have left the facility. Depending on how many contractors your casino sees, it’s possible to save enough money in the first year of verifying bills to recoup the investment made in the VMS. That’s solid ROI!

2. Staff according to traffic patterns.
As mentioned earlier, visitor management system reports contain a wealth of information. That data can be mined and interpreted to determine the correct amount of staffing to have on hand for various times of the day, week, month, etc. The casino will be able to use statistics from the VMS to make appropriate decisions about how many employees to have on hand for any given day or time. This means effective staffing based on need and efficient spending on wages for hourly employees.

3. “Go Green” and cut down on the use of paper.
A VMS eliminates the need for visitor sign-in sheets and logbooks. The manual system costs money in supplies and uses a lot of paper compared to an electronic VMS. In addition, it takes a lot of time to update and archive the manual sign-in books, not to mention searching through past records because of an incident in your building. By going digital, you improve efficiency by eliminating the time it takes to do manual searches.

Contact us to learn more

Contact us for a free demo of eVisitor Software for managing your visitor traffic OR to receive free samples of our time-expiring visitor badges.

Posted on 2/7/2020