NORTH AMERICAN CORPORATION

About North American Corporation

North American Corporation is headquartered in Glenview, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The company is a recognized leader in integrated and specialized business solutions, distribution, and marketing services all under one roof. Its various business groups include commercial products such as sanitary maintenance programs and foodservice disposables, packaging systems for equipment and supplies, as well as a strategic resource for integrated supply chain management solutions and a graphic services group that delivers communications services from graphic design to digital media management.

Client Challenge

When the North American management team was tasked with building a new facility for their growing operations, they had numerous requirements to consider not only in the design of their new 300,000 square foot building, but also in the installation of a security system. In addition to an expanded state of the art 24/7 warehouse distribution facility, the property was designed to incorporate their two-story headquarters corporate offices and various client services groups.

It became clear that an out-of-the box security solution was needed to integrate the facility design with the way North American’s business was run on a daily basis.

Security system design challenges included:

Problem Solved by Kastle

Kastle Systems fulfills North American’s most strategic requirements. North American chose to shift the burden of running and maintaining their entire facility’s security system to Kastle who will continuously provide the critical functions of ongoing system management: monitoring, programming, operations, administration, and system changes /upgrades. Without the need to maintain a security staff and infrastructure, the company has reduced its expenses and increased employee productivity.

Kastle designed solutions to establish zoned areas and restricted employee access to the distribution office, storage cages on the warehouse floor that contain expensive inventory, and a state-of-the-art media center and server room in the corporate headquarters offices. In the event that North American creates additional zones or makes other changes, its security system will continue to be flexible with Kastle making the necessary programming and design changes on demand.

Kastle developed a 24 /7 solution for access control and back up for each of the 36 loading dock access doors by configuring them on separate zones and centralizing the controls at an LCD panel.

This enabled employees to control loading dock access door activity from a centralized location and improved employee productivity by eliminating the need to walk to each bay to raise or lower the door.

By interfacing Kastle’s building access control system with the truck entrance access points, employees in the warehouse are able to utilize remote operation capability to control vendor entry/exit as needed.

All North American employees use a common main entrance. Management wanted to ensure that distribution center employees and corporate headquarters employees were granted authorized access only to their respective spaces. Kastle initialized North American cards with the appropriate authorizations, and more importantly, administers a flexible security system that can easily accommodate future changes in authorization.