State Government of Lower Austria trusts cashless payment with LEGIC® access control solution

The Symbio billing and administration system usee the existing LEGIC media in the form of company IDs

As in many large organisations, the State Government of Lower Austria used to manage various applications of personal identification - such as charging for meals, access control, time and attendance, parking permits - using separate cards.  In order to guarantee maximum quality when it comes to charging too, the Lower Austrian catering kitchen swiftly implemented a scheme to switch over to a HOTELDATA system which uses LEGIC media.  This was achieved smoothly within a single working day - after thorough background preparation.

Relevant data from various administration systems - master HR data, old catering system, access control, etc. - was imported into the HOTELDATA Symbio system and then checked and formatted as necessary in the run-up to changeover to the new solution as part of a large-scale logistic exercise. The Symbio hardware (five point-of-sale systems, four top-up machines for prepaid cards, twelve LEGIC read/write stations) was installed and connected to the in-house IT network and all related servers and subsystems by the time the target date arrived.

The Symbio billing and administration system now uses the existing LEGIC media in the form of company IDs as a means of payment and evidence of entitlement to various price categories, which differ depending on service provider, thus drastically reducing the amount of plastic money needed by combining many functions on a single medium.

Since the switchover to HOTELDATA, digging around in one's purse for change and juggling a bewildering variety of cards at the cash till are now a thing of the past.  The smart card which acts both as a company ID and a means of payment in all the restaurants of the Lower Austrian catering kitchen can be topped up with the required credit by using a top-up machine or, optionally, by deduction from one's salary account.

At the cash till, employees place their wallet on the card reader - the LEGIC card does not have to be taken out of the wallet - and the payment amount is automatically charged.  Before switching over to HOTELDATA, there had been plans to add an additional till to each of the two existing cash till positions on each floor in order to prevent the long payment queues that had been experienced with the previous system.  But since installing the powerful HOTELDATA system, queuing times have been significantly reduced.  It was therefore possible to abandon the idea of installing extra cash tills with a clear conscience and this obviously also saved money.

The new system also enables flexible, simple sales analysis as well as the full analysis functionality associated with SQL databases, for instance graphical sales reports, online report analysis and user-defined start screens.