When students come to study at the prestigious Les Roches Marbella campus in Spain, they are not just attending one of the world’s major hospitality business schools, they are also enveloped in extraordinary innovation and sophisticated living to mirror the exceptional experiences they are being prepared to facilitate in their future careers.
The institution aims to serve up “academic rigour with a twist of innovation and entrepreneurship” to its 1,000+ students from all corners of the planet who collectively represent more than 80 nationalities.
This real-life training site for elite hospitality professionals must offer an authentic, hands-on experience to its students — one that reflects the luxurious living and progressive comforts expected from high-end hospitality properties and their employees.
To ensure Les Roches is always ahead of the curve and a model campus when it comes to exemplary learning based on cutting-edge technologies, administrators wanted to evolve its mobile ecosystem. One particular aspect they sought to enrich was integrating “digital badge” access across their coastal Mediterranean property in Spain.
The project’s objective was to migrate to a mobile credentials-based system where a student’s plastic access card is replaced by a digital ID on a smartphone. This would serve as the verification for daily physical access and digital touchpoints (e.g., building access, vending machines, restaurant reservations, etc.). This effort would also allow the school to steer digital transformation and student efficiencies throughout its security and administrative functions.
“Everything here is about the student experience,” said Mano Soler, Director of Student Services and Operations at Les Roches Marbella. “It is our main driver and the reason we embrace and foster innovation because innovation makes our students’ lives easier and supports their well-being through secure technology. The students will eventually leave this campus and, in turn, take that know-how and excellence into the world with them.”
For 10 years, Les Roches Marbella relied on an RFID (radio frequency identification) card-based system to identify and grant access to students. This was a fundamental tool that nearly 1,000 individuals needed to have with them at all times to validate themselves day in and day out.
Supporting their quest for digital transformation, as part of the school’s Spark incubator programme, the leadership team wanted a mobile solution to fit specific campus requirements such as swiftly granting/removing accesses, avoiding disruption when students lose/forget cards, and accommodating a multi-system environment.
Management also wanted to drive improvements through back-office processes and procedures to save time and resources and enhance everyday life on campus through modern technology.
One of the most pressing factors for this particular mobile initiative was to achieve higher efficiency around the school’s new student intake registration/check-in process each semester. Loading ID credentials individually onto RFID cards, then printing each of the 1,000+ cards, meant corrections along the way were inevitable.
Yet, the transition to mobile didn’t come without a series of obstacles and serious considerations. Each touchpoint where a card was to be replaced with smartphone technology required deep analysis and complex integration work, specifically involving seven to eight different brands whose products were already deployed throughout the premises (e.g., printers, vending machines, security technologies, door access, laundry facilities, parking garages and more).
Les Roches required an access partner with solutions compatible with the many other products already in play within its existing infrastructure, and an ability to successfully address former system re-adaptation. In addition, the mobile technology needed to support both Android and iOS phones, as well as physical card technology (the RFID ecosystem would remain intact for non-student purposes and serve as a migration path for other areas not yet mobile).
The school wanted a single company to supply both the hardware and software elements. And, as a higher education establishment with upscale expectations and an outstanding reputation, the Les Roches decision-makers required a proven partner of this same ilk.
To transform technologies and reach new degrees of onsite productivity and novel amenities, Les Roches Marbella selected HID for its unmatched mobile access portfolio.
As a market pioneer in trusted identification and authentication, and with a network of partnerships that spans the globe, HID’s experts designed a system to meet each requirement from the school resulting in a tremendous collection of 40+ access points featuring mobile identification, app, portal, and reader technologies.
The integration project was completed within an accelerated time frame to ensure it was in place before students set foot onto campus that fall.
HID components that comprise this robust mobile ecosystem include HID OMNIKEY® readers and reader modules (OMNIKEY 5427, OMNIKEY 5127CK Mini, OMNIKEY 5127 Reader Core), HID Signo™ access control readers, HID Seos® mobile credentials, Aperio® locks from ASSA ABLOY and Aero™ X100 door modules.
With a slight tap or wave of their smartphone, students interact easily with the mobile ecosystem and via the digital Seos credential to authenticate themselves as they move throughout the property each day.
On a case-by-case basis, Les Roches Marbella is already finding ways to apply its in-house ingenuity to foster disruptive thinking. The school used 3D printers to design a customised case to house phones/tablets alongside HID access modules creating a unique, homegrown handheld tool that easily allows campus security personnel to check IDs as required.
This safety support tool came about when there was no suitable offering available on the market to meet the school’s specific needs for security checkpoints.
The flexibility and power of HID components enabled the team to re-imagine and invent an original Les Roches security product to, as always, improve the student experience. Many new use cases are in the works to fuel future “wins” across the premises.
Automated student attendance tracking is already at the beginning of each class period and serves as another way to further support and protect students. Mini computers and readers were installed in each classroom so students could use their mobile ID (via their smartphone) to mark attendance.
All is handled by a web application running on the mini-computer that pushes and pulls data to/from the Les Roches Absences application in real time through API-based interfaces.
And, when students go back to their dorm rooms any time, each door loc is integrated with the Aero door module, providing them with a seamless experience across the entire campus
