Traka: Securing assets and unlocking opportunities

Stefni Oliver, Vice President and Head of EMEIA, Traka speaks exclusively with ISJ.

For those who aren’t aware, how did Traka get started at Assa Abloy?

Traka was founded in 1995, from an innovative idea to help British Airways manage keys for its large fleet of ground support vehicles.

Over the following 30 years, we have continued to be the global leader in intelligent key management, also broadening our portfolio into asset management with our locker range and outside of aviation into all sectors.

ASSA ABLOY bought Traka in 2012, which gave us the opportunity to quickly expand globally and make a number of important acquisitions such as KEYper, the US based global market leader in key and asset management tailored specifically for the automotive sector.

Can you tell us more about your role and experience in the industry?

I am head of Europe, Middle East, India and Africa (EMEIA) for Traka.

We have many teams in many countries all over the world and I am responsible for looking after our people within the EMEIA region.

It is my role to ensure that our people in each country are given the tools and support to provide our clients with high standards of service, to collaborate with our partners and the wider business to deliver what is needed for our customers, whilst also driving innovation and growth.

Prior to joining Traka in 2023, I spent 25 years in various senior leadership positions in telecoms, IT and security, most recently as CEO of managed services provider Daisy Corporate Services – which has lent itself well when moving to Traka as another solution provider with customer service being at the forefront of our priorities.

What sort of industries is Traka involved in the UK and EMEIA region?

As we have been around for three whole decades, we have developed our hardware and software extensively, creating hundreds of new features driven by customer demand to help customers in every sector more effectively manage their business processes.

Our success in particular sectors can vary widely depending on the region. For example, we have huge success in South Africa in the mining sector where we help our customers manage access to the explosives for their mines.

As you can imagine, this is a less successful sector for us in Europe where we find ourselves performing well in high security sectors such as prisons, law enforcement, technology, data centres, finance and government entities.

We have targeted functionalities that have given us great success in many areas, with a particular functionality focus.

One that springs to mind is our FIX solution for Faulty Item Exchange which utilises our asset management locker solution – stationing lockers at a number of hubs across the country on client’s sites. 

This works well for any client with a high number of employees spread over a large region and has worked well for our end user customers such as NHS (National Health Service) trusts in the UK; also for service providers who handle outsourced IT for enterprise customers for bringing efficiencies into dealing with faulty devices.

Rather than asking employees to travel a long way to return a faulty laptop, for example, or sending engineers all over the country to fix or swap out the faulty device, our FIX solution can integrate with the clients’ IT ticketing system.

End users are able to then seamlessly log an IT ticket and choose a locker to return their faulty device to at a hub that is convenient for them. They can return their faulty device to the chosen locker and immediately take a loan device from another compartment within the lockers.

These compartments can be enabled with the ability to charge devices or even provide connectivity for engineers to rebuild machines remotely, without the need to travel to a hub. 

The efficiencies that this provides for our clients in saved man-hours and travel time for both employees and engineers makes a huge difference to the way they run their business, and in the case of the National Health Service, has a direct impact on the time spent in direct patient contact.

Another great example of targeted functionality is our loading bay safety management solution, ‘Docksafe’ which is designed for distribution centres, built from a customer request to prevent lorries from driving off bays until it is confirmed that the bay area is cleared for them to move, in order to prevent accidental injury or death.

Our solution is a low cost, yet highly effective alternative to built-in wheel clamps for the lorries which can cost distribution centres around £10,000 per loading bay.

Our KEYper branded product range mentioned earlier is designed to maximise security and efficiency and reduce losses in the automotive sector.

Always having access to car keys is extremely important to our clients, whether moving cars through the auto shop processes or demoing cars with customers.

Therefore, access to cabinets needs to be closely controlled, with events audited by the software and the inbuilt camera in the cabinet and managed through an easy to use mobile app.

KEYper also provides and enables integrations with dealer management systems, speeding up the movement of keys as cars come and go within the dealership.

KEYper helps dealers with understanding the location of vehicles in the system, providing parking location information as well as advising of other vehicles that need to be moved to access the required vehicle.

KEYper has been a fantastic addition to our portfolio and is rapidly expanding out of the US and across the EMEIA region.

Where is the biggest opportunity for growth, both geographically and industry-wise?

We see great opportunity for growth in the tailored sector solutions mentioned above, which have been refined and incubated in one country, with exponential growth, and so we look forward to global success as we extend each of these into our wider global footprint.

We are seeing traction on customer spend from governments, unfortunately driven by the uncertainty of war. Many governments and municipalities are increasing their spend on weapons management and similar.

As we are fortunate enough to have solutions that can be adapted to client’s operational processes across all sectors, we can take advantage of an upturn in any sector, in any region, utilising our wide range of available functionalities and taking advantage of customised integrations as needed.

Are there still companies who may not be aware this technology exists? If so, how is your team educating them on the return on investment for these types of solutions?

This is indeed our daily challenge as our solution is frequently encompassed in security, where everyone knows about video surveillance, intrusion systems or access control, but a much lower proportion of the right people understand the advantages that key and asset management provides.

There is a continuous exercise of educating the market by creating informative content, providing trials or demos, hosting webinars and workshops and of course by attending the 50+ exhibitions and trade shows that we participate in each year just in the EMEIA region.

We are also fortunate to have many of our new clients proactively approaching us due to recommendation from other clients in their sector, and if they need a little more convincing, we have a huge back catalogue of case studies and client use cases across all sectors which helps our clients to see how others in their sector have taken advantage of their own Traka solution to get visibility and effective management of their assets, gain efficiency and greatly improve on the security of how their assets are managed.

Where do you see the future of key and asset management going?

While digital and smart lock technologies are becoming more popular, physical keys still offer unique advantages that ensure their continued relevance (simplicity and reliability, cost-effectiveness, no power dependency, durability, privacy and security).

That being said, as access control is digitised, with the rapid move to mobile credentials for example, we expect to see a reduction in the number of physical keys.

However, the importance of managing physical and mechatronic keys will be greater. That means that the importance of robust key management solution such as Traka’s will continue to be a must.

We expect that companies that previously did not recognise the need for key and asset control may now find themselves subject to new regulations, such as NIS2 as these regulations require more stringent measures for access control and asset management.

We expect the rapid growth of lockers to manage the storage and access of a wide range of assets to continue.

Improving the automation of asset identification, allowing customers to place items into lockers and remove them with as little (or no) administration, will continue to add value and this is an important focus area for Traka.

Additionally, with respect to the growth of intelligent lockers and the automation of asset detection and assurance, we see increasing needs around kits of equipment comprising multiple valuable/sensitive items and item types across many sectors and applications.

We also see the growing trend for different types of intelligent locker solutions for non-industrial sectors and applications, for example, due to the changing nature of global working practices such as hybrid working and the rise of flexible office spaces.

Overall, the future of key and asset management will be characterised by greater integration, enhanced security, increased automation and the use of data to drive decision-making.

Traka’s solutions are well-positioned to lead these advancements and we are excited to see what the future brings!