Citizen Systems Optimises Print and ID for Israeli Parliament Visitors

5th September 2017

Logistics BusinessCitizen Systems Optimises Print and ID for Israeli Parliament Visitors

Citizen Systems is helping the Israeli Parliament (pictured) to optimise its printing of identity and authorised entry tags for all visitors.

As the legislative body with the responsibility to elect Israel’s President, as well as pass all national laws, the Knesset demands nothing less than exceptional reliability and outstanding technical support when it comes to printing technology. When the Israeli parliament was struggling with an old and frequently failing system for printing identity and authorised entry tags at reception for its numerous visitors and invitees, it turned to leading printing, scanning and software specialist VCODE Solutions Ltd and Citizen Systems Europe for a more effective alternative.

“The Knesset is extremely busy and has vast numbers of officials through its door for important meetings or guided tours every day,” explained Zeev Weigman, Co-owner of VCODE. “As a result, it needs to print more than 180,000 entrance tags each year, but the previous system could not keep up and was regularly requiring maintenance and causing downtime. The supplier of those printers was also slow to resolve technical issues, which when considering the printers are central to the security of the parliament, was not at all satisfactory.”

Weigman along with fellow VCODE Co-owner Alon Azarzar worked with the Knesset to update the existing set-up with the implementation of a series of CL-S621 desktop printers from Citizen to enhance the management of people traffic. The flexibility of the Citizen printers meant the business partners were able to adapt the devices to work with the commands of the system that was already in place and had previously been connected to the old printers.

The CL-S621s are now being used to quickly and efficiently help manage the flow of people into the building in Jerusalem. When visitors and committee members arrive at reception they are given a printed entry permit label that features their name and unique ID barcode and the Knesset logo. If the person is arriving for a committee meeting, the barcode will be scanned with Datalogic readers that bring up information to ensure the official has authorisation to be in parliament.

The fast, maintenance-free and easy to use CL-S621 printers were selected by VCODE because it knew the technology could deliver the reliability and performance required for such a demanding system. The devices have since exceeded expectations and are leading to considerable time and cost savings within the parliament. For example, the capacity of the previous printers meant that the ribbons had to be replaced frequently, but downtime and maintenance requirements have been cut dramatically following the implementation of the Citizen units as they handle ribbons of up to 360 metres, and media changes are particularly quick and simple.

The precision-engineered CL-S621 printers are also compact so they take up only minimal space in the busy reception area of the Knesset, yet they are robust enough to cope with the challenge of high volume workloads over a long service life. Equally, the units feature ARCP™ ribbon control technology to guarantee clear prints and eliminate the risk of unreadable labels and barcodes.

“The six Citizen label printers have been in place for more than a year now and we’ve seen huge improvements in the way we deal with the demands of our internal customers, the large number of visitors and the many problems we had with previous equipment,” said Sharon Cohen, Head of System and Applications in the Knesset’s Department of Information Technology.

“The combination of superior equipment and excellent technical support has been instrumental to the successful implementation of the high quality and efficient solution, which has allowed us to save costs and time and, most importantly, enhance security. We’ve been so pleased with the technology that we’ve also installed a Citizen CL-S700 industrial printer for our warehouse logistics operations, therefore we know that the Citizen brand is a brand we can trust and rely on.”