Achieving key objectives, the Royal Elephant Hotel presents a most impressive prospect situated north west of the Centurion CBD; its striking architecture and exceptionally detailed interior design makes it obvious that this is fast becoming the flagship hotel for the region.
But for a hotel to build a reputation of the five-star level demanded by its fastidious customers, means very close attention to detail behind the scenes. And no one works harder on attention to detail than the property development team, to implement technology to ensure 24-hour service and security for the hotel and their guests.
The GM of the hotel, and Gert van Wyk, representatives for the Pillow and Spoon property group, are clear about their primary requirements for the IT systems and security camera network. "We want total application integration and 24/7 system availability for security, we need identification level images of everyone entering and leaving the hotel, at all times, and we want observation level images of all public areas."
Merit Technology Solutions
Merit Technology Solutions is a leading provider of technology solutions to large corporations. It is the job of Merit TS to turn the requirement specification for the Royal Elephant Hotel into a technical design, and to handle the implementation on their behalf. We have highly experienced staff in both IT and CCTV fields and we are justly proud of the work done at the Royal Elephant Hotel.
CCTV Installation:
Digitalisation is yet again the cause of wide-ranging advances in technology. Until recently, CCTV was limited to relatively short distances and only accessible by a select few. This is no longer the case. IP-CCTV opens the realms of surveillance and provides a whole host of new possibilities, which includes many significant enhancements over traditional CCTV implementations.
Key benefits of high availability IT systems:
* Maximum system availability
* Information sharing between systems
* Quality management information
* Accurate transaction Information
* Preventing difficult situations with guests
* Royal Elephant staff can concentrate on core business
At the Royal Elephant Hotel, the IT systems are hosted in a secure, air-conditioned server room. All servers, storage devices and critical network equipment are connected to uninterrupted power supplies. A 500KVA diesel generator to ensure that customer service is not affected as a result of power outages backs up the entire building.
For further reliability all systems are fitted with redundant power supplies. Storage devices make use of redundant disk technology and IT security is achieved by the installation of a state of the art firewall appliance, which includes anti-virus, anti-spam and anti-intrusion software components.
In the Royal Elephant, that means that all hotel management applications are inter linked to ensure that the IT systems shares information and ultimately will present a single bill to guests.
The importance of comprehensive accounting and management information added with high availability systems provides for sound business decisions. For guests every effort has been taken to provide wired and wireless entertainment, telephone and Internet services. This technology rollout should not be underestimated as a contributing factor to the overall customer experience.
For CCTV security the main public entrances have discreet dome cameras recognisable only to the expert eye, that are covering the pedestrian traffic through the main doors, and other cameras maintains observation on the parking areas.
The restaurants and convention centre have a series of cameras and are also integrated with points of sale terminals. For corridor security, the layout of the hotel contributes to an unobtrusive yet comprehensive system meeting at the lift areas.
The cameras throughout the building - 35 in total - all linked into NVRs. With the recording policies adopted at the Royal Elephant, when NVRs are replayed, the images are of broadcast quality.
Key benefits of a well-implemented CCTV system:
* Prevention of criminal incidents
* Identification of suspects and positive evidence
* Objective incident management
* A safe environment for guests
Royal Elephant comment
Lex Pienaar, CEO of Merit TS, describes the key issues of IT and CCTV in hotels. “We assist our customers to find a balance between the system availability and surveillance methods accordingly. We needed the technology system to be completely consistent with the Royal Elephant Hotel's image. If IT or security were judged by their guests to be either too lax or too obtrusive, then the special experience of staying at the Royal Elephant Hotel would be lessened and they would quite rightly lose guests."
Our most important objective is to install technology to assist with giving guests a safe and carefree stay at the Royal Elephant Hotel.
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