Case Study
Endemol Productions, London
Possibly best known in the UK for producing Big Brother and Changing Rooms, Endemol are a successful company
with a very professional image. A major production company with Europe-wide coverage, the UK operation is
on three floors of a refurbished building in Shepherd’s Bush. Security is very important to Endemol and they had
historically used manned security on their offices to protect them from casual intruders and ensure those people
gaining access were authorised.
Danny Chapman, the facilities manager at Endemol, explained; “this did sometimes cause difficulties. Due to the
nature of the business, we do have a high turnover of different individuals. Quite a few of the staff are freelance
production people and will only be coming to us for the duration of the production they are working on. This
meant that the security people would quite often ring me in the evenings and weekends to check that they could
allow certain people in.”
“Big Brother staff have access 24 hours a day”
With the move to new refurbished premises it was decided to investigate
an electronic access control system.There are several entrances to the new
offices and it is a multi-tenanted building. It was very important to ensure
only Endemol staff had free access. Michael Rothwell of Mercury Security
Systems was asked for advice. A demonstration of Net2, an access control
system manufactured by Paxton Access Ltd., was set up in Endemol’s
old building. The facilities management team were impressed with the
evident simplicity of using the software and the features available. They
decided to go ahead and have Net2 installed on the new premises.
Once Mercury Security Systems commenced the installation, Danny took
on the responsibility of setting up all the users and running the system in
the initial period. Danny says; “The software was very easy to learn being
Windows based. In fact I have now handed the daily management over to
our human resources department and having not touched it for months,
I would feel totally confident in picking up and running with it again. I
trained the human resources staff and they also found the administration
very easy to learn. At most I would say they spend half an hour on
administration a day. This is mainly time spent issuing new cards and
barring access for cards issued to non permanent staff who have moved
on or lost cards.”
Case Study
Initial set up of just over three hundred staff took Danny about a day and a
half. Endemol use a lot of the features available on the software including
time zones and access levels. Danny gives these examples: “Big Brother
production staff must have access to the building and their production
area twenty four hours a day. The Big Brother team are the only people set
up with access on the entrance to their area. Our cleaners only have access
from 5pm - 9pm and only to limited areas of the offices. We also have some
staff set up with individual access rights according to the requirements of
their work. It has given us a high degree of flexibility in the control of access
to our premises and restricted areas within them.”
“Our security costs have reduced substantially”
Endemol have complete confidence in the security provided by their new
access system.
Danny says; “Installing Net2 has been a big benefit for us. We no longer
have manned security as we are so confident that with this system in place
we have no need of it. The result is that our budget for security has reduced
quite substantially, yet I feel that our offices are better protected.”
Danny would have no hesitation in recommending Net2 to other business users. The flexibility of the system
combined with the cost savings achieved, mean Net2 has been a good investment for Endemol.
System user:
Type of site
Type of system
System description
Installer
Endemol Productions UK
Commercial
Net2 PC based system
25 doors, 500-600 users
Mercury Security Systems, Potter’s Bar