Scania Australia Campbellfield: Replacing a Legacy Access Control and CCTV System

Scania Australia’s Campbellfield facility was running on a Tecom Challenger V8 access control and alarm system, managed through Forcefield on a server more than fifteen years old. It still worked, and that was the difficulty. Nothing had failed badly enough to force a decision, but a serious server failure would have taken credential data, historical records and the ability to manage users on site with it. Integrated Security Services rebuilt the site around commercial access control, alarm and CCTV platforms designed to be repeated across other Scania locations.

What fifteen years of service had cost

Security systems rarely fail all at once. They wear out in pieces, and Campbellfield had reached the point where the pieces were adding up. The Challenger panels were old, the cabling behind them had deteriorated, and network communication between parts of the system had become unreliable. Forcefield, the software managing it all, was running on hardware that predated most of the people using it.

The CCTV was in a similar state. Some cameras had stopped working altogether. Others still recorded, but the footage they produced at night was no longer good enough to identify anyone or settle an argument, which is the only reason to keep the recordings at all.

For Scania’s facilities and procurement teams, the question was never which box to buy. It was how to get off a fragile platform and onto something they could still have confidence in years from now.

A standard Scania can repeat

We worked through the design with Scania and settled on Inner Range Integriti for access control and intruder alarm management. Inner Range builds and supports its products in Australia, which matters when a site this size needs parts or answers quickly.

Campbellfield was treated as the first of several rather than a one-off. The architecture, the naming conventions and the way the system is structured were all decided with other Scania sites in mind, so the next facility starts from a known standard instead of a blank page. That saves money on the second site and every one after it, and it means a technician who knows one Scania system knows them all.

Changing every card without stopping the site

Scania was also moving off 125 kHz proximity cards, a technology that is easy to clone and long past its best, and onto MIFARE high-frequency smart cards. On a working site with a full population of existing card holders, that cannot happen over a weekend.

We designed the changeover so both card types worked side by side while the swap was under way. People kept getting through the doors they needed on the card they already had, and new credentials were issued progressively rather than in one disruptive push. Nobody had to queue at reception because of a security upgrade.

Working around a live site and a builder

Campbellfield stayed open throughout. At the same time, separate building works were running through reception and the office areas, some of which held parts of the existing Challenger infrastructure, and the site’s communications room was being relocated.

That meant pulling equipment out of construction zones, diverting cabling and power temporarily, moving communications infrastructure, and shifting services across to the new system a piece at a time, all while the site stayed properly secured. A single cutover was never realistic. We staged the work around Scania’s operations and the builder’s program, and let the old and new systems run together wherever that was the safer option.

Rebuilding the CCTV from the cabling up

Hanging new cameras on old cable is a quick way to inherit someone else’s problems, so the commercial CCTV system was rebuilt from the infrastructure out. New Hanwha Vision IP cameras were installed across the facility and brought together in Nx Witness, which gives Scania a platform their own people can actually use for live viewing, searching and exporting footage.

Most of what decides whether a CCTV system is still working properly in eight years never appears on a monitor. New Category 6 cabling went in, along with patch panels, proper cable management, labelling and the enclosures to house it. That is not about a tidy photo on handover day. It is about the next person who opens the rack, whether that is one of our technicians or someone from Scania’s own team, being able to see what is going on without tracing wires by hand.

Facilities teams live with a bad installation long after the installer has gone. Doing the infrastructure properly costs a little more at the start and takes most of the cost and disruption out of every change that follows. We took the same approach on the Riverside Golf and Sports Centre rebuild for the same reasons.

Resilience built in where it counts

The Hanwha cameras record to onboard SD cards as well as to the recorder, so a break between a camera and the recording server does not automatically mean lost footage. The recorder’s own health is monitored separately, which means a fault gets noticed when it happens rather than the week after an incident, when somebody goes looking for a clip that was never written.

None of this is visible on an ordinary Tuesday. It matters enormously on the one day it is needed.

Seeing an alarm instead of guessing at it

The biggest practical change at Campbellfield came from putting access control, alarms and cameras on speaking terms. The Integriti and Nx Witness integration ties alarm events to the cameras covering that area, so when an alarm comes in, the control room can pull up live vision of the spot that triggered it.

That changes what happens next. The alarm might be a door that has not latched properly. It might be something environmental. Or the vision might show activity that needs a patrol, a call to Scania personnel, or emergency services, and the operator can say so with confidence rather than guessing. Before the upgrade, an after-hours activation meant a phone call to a facilities staff member who had almost no information to work with. Now there is video verified alarm monitoring behind the call.

Authorised Scania staff can also log into the surveillance system remotely, so working out what has happened no longer means driving to site at two in the morning to look at a screen.

What changed for the team at Campbellfield

The clearest result does not appear on an equipment schedule. Scania’s team had spent years working around unreliable infrastructure, nuisance alarms and footage that let them down when they needed it. They now have a system they can take at face value.

When an alarm comes in, it is more likely to mean something. There is vision to check it against. Facilities staff can look for themselves from wherever they are. Underneath all of it sits new infrastructure and system health monitoring, doing the unglamorous work of making sure the technology is ready when somebody finally needs it.

Campbellfield also produced something more useful than one good installation. Working with Scania’s facilities and procurement teams, we ended up with a repeatable security standard built on Inner Range Integriti, Nx Witness, Hanwha IP cameras and integrated video verification, ready to carry into the next site.

Talk to Integrated Security Services

We build commercial security systems for organisations that need them to keep working long after handover day, and you can see more of that work on our recent projects page. If you are carrying ageing access control or CCTV infrastructure, or you are working out how to standardise security across several facilities, we would welcome the chance to look at how your organisation actually operates.

Contact Integrated Security Services to talk it through. Call 1300 992 090 or email info@integratedsecurity.com.au.