Traka Americas: Putting the right keys in the right place

In this exclusive discussion taken from the ISJ Leaders in Security Podcast, James Thorpe chats product development and education security with Traka Americas’ Danny Garrido.

Can you provide an overview of your company and the sectors it serves?

At the root of it all, Traka is a key and asset management company.

We provide a range of solutions, but we are particularly well known for our electronic key locker solutions as well as our asset management locker solutions. Our product portfolio allows us to serve a range of different sectors.

When you think about Traka, everyone sees our hardware and recognises us as a manufacturer.

But, I think one of the things that really makes us unique as a business is the emphasis we put on software – the ability to drive change through process control.

The sectors we cover vary geographically; what we do in Australia is not necessarily the same thing we do here in the Americas.

Though it does differ from place to place, the main sectors we focus on are education and campus security, property management (residential environments such as apartment buildings) hospitality and government as well.

We are also exploring emerging sectors such as correctional facilities and law enforcement.

What factors and perspectives do you consider when developing new products to meet customer needs?

It’s all about the customers. We engage with multiple end user groups at conferences and events around the world throughout the year. Quite simply, we listen.

Originally, we were trying to develop based on a strategy of things that we thought the marketplace needed. We wanted to innovate and do all these great things with our product.

Whilst there is a place for that, it’s also a challenging approach. If you’re not close enough to the customer, you may stray off track.

Today, we tend to focus on what our customers are saying and innovate through the things that we know that they need – things that they are asking for.

We haven’t lost that other desire to innovate in the background, but we have focused on scalability, reliability and security.

These three things are really important, no matter what market sector you are designing or specifying solutions for.

What features do Traka solutions offer to ensure safety, while making key management more efficient and accountable for educational institutions?

Unfortunately, education and campus security has been an area growing for us for all the wrong reasons over the last few years.

Our cabinet solutions offer several features that have been built-in since the beginning, inherently enabling things like quick access, but still in a very secure way.

Additionally, we have created size variations for the K-12 market as well as a range of other sectors.

It allows environments like schools and university campuses to put critical keys where they are needed – we are not providing solutions that just store keys for the sake of storing keys.

It’s about putting keys and assets that have a purpose in the right place so that, unfortunately, if there is an event that needs to be addressed, they can be available quickly.

More importantly, only people who are authorised to access these keys or assets will have access to them. This means that we specifically tailor our solutions to the education and campus security space.

An important component to our work in education is collaborating with the schools and local first responders.

We’ve seen how critically important it is for both entities to proactively implement solutions that empower responders to address threats and protect against unauthorised access to various departments of the school.

Also, being able to monitor activity, including key usage, from a remote location has been invaluable, especially for institutions that have multiple buildings on a campus or even all schools within a K-12 district.

It gives administrators a 10,000 foot view and removes some of the operational silos that can negatively impact efficiency within a system.

Can you discuss the importance of employing the right people within your company to ensure consistent growth and success?

It has always been about the people. We look for people that have a customer-centric mindset. A tinkerer’s mindset – those who are always looking to improve something.

We encourage failure, believe it or not, because we like when people mess with things and break them apart. This helps them find a way to make things better.

Those are the kinds of people that thrive in our environment.

When you look at our interview process and the things we’re doing, of course we are looking for a great resume and the right skills, but ultimately, it comes down to that time we spend with them.

We try and find people that are going to be doing whatever they’re passionate about.

We want them to know they are having an impact. That’s what’s been so helpful to us over the years.