With the help of a large professional staff, volunteers, and individual and corporate donors, Orchard Place provides a wide range of mental health services for children including residential, outpatient, in-home and care coordination programmes.

“In the past, we used a standard lock and key system,” explained Scott Heldt, Director of Environmental Services, Orchard Place. “Keys were being lost or not returned. This resulted in having to reissue keys for many of our building to our employees.”

Orchard Place employs almost 400 staff, provides therapy services at numerous Des Moines area school sites, and operates a large outpatient programme. On their main residential campus, there are six buildings with an 88-bed capacity for clients. Along with residential facilities, Orchard Place operates a K-12 school in cooperation with the local school district.

“With the re-key hassle and expense, senior management recognised the need to make a change. In addition, a better system was needed to continue to meet the accreditation requirements of The Joint Commission in terms of our safety and security standards. Now with our 3xlogic Infinias system, we are confident Orchard Place is much better positioned to maintain a safe and secure environment for the clients, staff and visitors at our facilities, as would be expected by The Joint Commission and other regulatory bodies.”

3xlogic Infinias is installed at the main campus, covering all external doors and the internal server room door and maintenance shop door; one door is installed at the Pace Juvenile Center building; and three external doors and one server room door are managed by Infinias at the Child Guidance Center, an outpatient facility.

In total, Orchard Place currently has 35 doors under management, with two additional doors planned at the Pace location. “What we’ve installed so far has worked quite well in terms of our growth and needs,” said Heldt. “At my former employer, we had a different access control system that had 8-door limits at a time. It is a real plus to be able to add single doors at an affordable price with our 3xlogic system.”

There are a total of 464 users under management; a number of these are employees and volunteers who in the past were not issued keys. So the 3xlogic system provides a greater degree of flexibility for Orchard Place. Control Installation Integrators did the initial installation, but once both Scott Heldt and Tyler Cumings, Manager of Facilities, completed training from 3xlogic, they’ve been empowered to install and programme the system themselves. “I think the 3xlogic product is incredibly user friendly. It’s made in such a way that our organisation can just take it and run with it—it’s a whole new world. It’s amazing how simplified 3xlogic has made the installation and use of the software,” said Heldt.