BAR — Badge Request Access
Employees request their own badge. Your badge office gets its day back.
New hire starts Monday and the badge already works. Getting a badge into a new person's hand takes days, and almost never because somebody said no. It takes days because the request lived in an email chain, because the approver did not know it was waiting, because nobody told the print shop, and because the card was mailed and then switched on over the phone. BAR makes that one workflow — on top of the access control system you already own.
Open the deck · Download the PDFWho it is for
Large estates with a badge office. Thousands of employees across many sites, each able to request a badge with the single sign-on they already have, from wherever they are; approvals that route themselves and chase themselves; printing at whichever shop serves the site. The badge office stops being the help desk for requests and spends its time on the exceptions — lost cards, special access, audits.
How it goes
1. They sign in with the account they already have. Microsoft single sign-on. No new password, no form to hunt for, no email to write.
2. They ask for the job, not the access levels. The site and what the person does. Facilities carry named access bundles, so the same job always gets the same access — and an auditor a year later can read why somebody has what they have.
3. It routes itself, and chases. BAR works out who approves that site and in what order. A later level does not open until the one before it clears, and a scheduled job reminds approvers who are sitting on a decision. Four defined cases skip the queue: an executive's own request, a security-staff replacement, a supervisor asking for a direct report, and a same-facility renewal inside six months.
4. Approved, printed, posted. The badge goes to the print shop that serves that site — your own badging office or an outside bureau — with the shipping address already attached. At the same moment BAR creates the card in your access control system switched off. Whoever ships it records the tracking number, and BAR emails the recipient a link and a code, which is also printed on the letter that travels with the badge.
5. They scan the code, and they are in. The new starter scans the code, signs in as themselves, and BAR switches the card on in your access control system. They walk up to the door and it opens. No trip to the security office, no call to a control room.
Why it is safer than what you do today
A printed badge is a working key from the moment it leaves the printer. It goes through a courier network, sits in a post room, and lies on a desk — and all of that time it opens doors.
- The card is created in your access control system switched off, and stays that way until claimed.
- The activation code is single use and tied to one badge, generated when the badge ships.
- Only the badge holder can spend it. Activation needs them signed in, and BAR checks the signed-in person is who the badge was made for. A forwarded code in anybody else's hands is refused.
- It expires, and it burns. The code stops working once used and after its window closes. Security can revoke one, or issue a fresh one if a badge went astray.
- Every step is written down as it happens — who asked, who approved and when, what your access control system answered, the tracking number, and who activated it.
Lost in the post becomes a re-issue, not an incident report.
Activation needs the holder to have a work account they can sign into. Badges for people without one — day-one contractors, visitors — are handed over in person and switched on by an administrator.
Where it fits
| Access control | Schneider Electric EcoStruxure Security Expert today. BAR creates the cardholder, reserves and assigns the card, and switches it on and off. That is the one platform it drives right now — a second platform is a piece of work we would scope, not a setting we would tick. |
| Mobile credentials | Visitors today, employees next. HID mobile credentials are issued on the visitor path. For employees BAR tracks a mobile credential and its status but does not yet issue one; the physical badge is the route that works end to end. |
| Sign-in | Microsoft Entra ID. Roles decide who can approve, ship or revoke. |
| Print shops | Your own badging office, an outside bureau, or both. Sites are mapped to the shop that serves them, so a multi-plant estate can run several at once. |
| Deployment | Runs on infrastructure you control, with your own database. Email goes out over your own mail server. |
BAR is built, not deployed. The whole path above is working software that has been run end to end against a live Schneider Electric EcoStruxure Security Expert system. No customer is running BAR in production today, so nothing here is marked as live and there is no reference call to offer yet. If that matters to you, say so early and we will tell you exactly where a first deployment stands.
Support terms are set by the agreement you sign. No uptime figure and no response-time promise appears anywhere in this material. Where a vendor product is named, it is named because we integrate with it — not to imply a partnership, certification or endorsement.
See it on your own system
Book a thirty-minute demo. We will walk one badge from request to open door, and tell you plainly what would have to be built for your estate. knightwatch.net
Knight Watch installs and services access control systems as an integrator. The people who wrote the provisioning call know the panel behind the door — which is why the card can be created switched off rather than created late.