Turning the smart city vision into reality at the city of Peachtree Corners, Georgia

Leveraging Kisi’s mobile and cloud-based access control, Brandon Branham, CTO at Peachtree Corners, pushes their smart city agenda closer to reality. Discover how to efficiently manage access with Kisi for your local government.

The city of Peachtree Corners has 42,243 residents and a prospering economy due to the strength of engineering and technology firms. Building on this, Peachtree Corners has developed its vision of becoming a smart city. This means using technology to improve the quality of life, satisfaction, and safety of their residents.

To develop new innovations for the city, Brandon Branham, CTO at Peachtree Corners, heads up “Curiosity Lab”, a 500-acre real-world test environment for next-generation mobility and smart city technology. A 25,000 sqft innovation center serves as the operating hub for startups and established companies. Plenty of technology startups, like Beep, i-charging, and Juganu, choose Curiosity Lab to develop these innovations and need to be able to work on them any time of day while keeping their inventions safe and secure.

“Before Kisi, I needed the person to WhatsApp me and let someone in. Badges got lost on a daily basis. I needed remote access that would work for multiple tenants and support 24/7 access - as well as provide clean record tracking for audit purposes.”, says Brandon Branham, CTO at Peachtree Corners, about his motivation to install Kisi at the 14 doors of the lab. This is where their story with Kisi began.

Kisi turned out to be of great help at Curiosity Lab, so Brandon and his team considered rolling Kisi out to more facilities - starting with city hall. But before, some detailed due diligence had to happen. The overall success goal was to reduce effort and increase resilience - specifically, this meant:

• Onboarding process: How long does it take a new user to get onboarded, and how many issues did they encounter? With Kisi, onboarding was mostly self-service via the Kisi mobile app. No manual picking up of credentials or calls for lost badges were happening anymore.
• Uptime: What if fiber lines get cut - Kisi will still work in offline mode.
• User happiness: The number of complaints from residents and tenants about access control - which was very low with Kisi.
• Peer feedback: As a final check, Brandon was also looking for social proof to validate Kisi’s performance. He reached out to some local companies in Atlanta that already used Kisi and got great feedback. This peer-to-peer review was very important to their decision-making.

After this gut check, the team at Peachtree Corners was confident to replace their current on-premise system at City Hall with Kisi’s cloud based access control for additional functionalities and connected the 47 additional doors to Kisi. To keep the migration cost low, they leveraged Kisi’s access platform including the Wiegand board. This setting allows Peachtree Corners to keep legacy hardware in place while still benefiting from the advantages of a cloud-based management system for access control.

Some key features of this new cloud-based access control the team likes:

• App access and flexible credentials: Badges were too risky and costly for use at the innovation center. The people in this tech cradle gladly use the top-rated Kisi mobile app to access their spaces. At the same time, the different user groups in the city hall get to choose between unlocking with Kisi from their phone or using the previously issued badges, which they easily integrated within the Kisi platform.
• Schedule unlocks remotely: Public meetings where they adopt ordinances are open to the public after working hours two times a week. With Kisi, they can schedule unlocks so the public can access the City Hall without credentials during these specific time slots. Remotely controlling those schedules is crucial: Some meetings that are scheduled to run 2 hours end in 45 minutes. The game changer for the admin team was Kisi’s functionality to remotely take off the schedule from their mobile phone. Before, they had to VPN into a local machine to edit the schedule.
• Meeting rooms: Management of locking conference doors and running through a booking system. The problem was that someone could just hop into the meeting room.
• Wiegand support: Upgrading the legacy city hall system was only possible due to Kisi’s cost-efficient deployment platform that enables organizations to reuse existing hardware. This enables a tailored deployment path that fits the city budget so that Peachtree Corner can seamlessly migrate to the complete Kisi solution.
• In & Out tracking: Highly watched areas that are critical for city operation, like the Public Safety Department, can be tightly secured.
• Managing access for different user groups, e.g., cleaners, vendors, contractors, researchers, or delivery.

What’s next for Kisi at Peachtree Corners?

After the initial success, there are multiple different use cases the city is considering Kisi for. These include:

• Unlock remote located garages leveraging a 5G connection
• Secure offsite facilities like A/V closets or the public safety shed that are distributed throughout the city
• Curiosity Lab expansion with Cobot integration
• Replacing the current Wiegand hardware with Kisi to maximize the ease of use and utilize additional functionalities
• And many more ideas… Stay tuned!