Employee ID & Access Solutions for Corporate & Enterprise

What Corporate & Enterprise card programs need

• Photo employee IDs that double as access cards
• Consistent, on-brand card design
• Contractor and visitor badges
• Multi-site or networked issuance
• Fast reissue for new hires and replacements

One badge, every door

For most companies the employee ID is also the building key. Card Imaging helps you pick a dual-sided printer with the right encoder and program access credentials to your system. For larger or multi-site programs, our Card Imaging ID card software manages design, cardholder data, and issuance from a central database.

For most companies the employee ID and the building key are the same piece of plastic, and that is the whole design brief. It has to look like the brand, it has to open the right doors, and it has to be replaceable on a Tuesday morning when somebody leaves theirs on the train. For how other sectors handle this, see our overview of card programs by industry.

We have been fitting Illinois businesses with card systems since 1984, from single-office firms to companies running badge programs across a dozen sites.

One badge, every door

Combining identity and access into one card is the default now, and it is the right default. Two cards means people carry one and lose the other.

The mechanics are straightforward once you know what your readers accept. We program HID credentials, covering HID Prox, iCLASS SE and SR, and SEOS, in the common formats including 26-bit H10301 and 37-bit H10304. If your access control system reads HID credentials, we can supply cards already programmed to your facility code and card range, so they arrive ready to print and hand out rather than requiring a separate encoding step. That is set out on our prox and access card programming page.

If you are not sure what technology your readers use, tell us the reader model and we can usually work it out. The access credentials and encoding guide covers the concepts without assuming prior knowledge.

The badge is a brand surface

An employee badge is worn in client meetings, at reception, in the lift, and in photographs. It is a more visible piece of brand collateral than most of what marketing produces, and it is usually the one nobody looked at.

Color accuracy matters if your brand color is distinctive. Full-color printing at 300 dpi handles most palettes well, and printers with an optimized color mode do noticeably better on flat corporate colors than a basic unit will. Printing over the edge removes the white border that makes a badge look cheap.

Dual-sided printing gives you somewhere to put the things that would otherwise clutter the front: a return address, terms of use, an emergency number, or a QR code. We supply the printers and the stock; the card design itself is something you or your designer will want to own.

Onboarding, offboarding, and the pace of it

The badge program moves at the speed of hiring. A new starter with no badge on day one is a bad first impression and a practical nuisance for whoever has to keep letting them through doors.

Printing in house solves this properly. A badge printed the morning somebody starts costs a couple of minutes. The same badge ordered externally arrives in the second week.

Offboarding is the other half and matters more. A card that still opens a door after somebody leaves is a real security gap. Whatever your process is, make sure deactivating the credential is part of it rather than an afterthought, and make collecting the physical card a separate step from disabling it in the system.

More than one site

Multi-site badge programs go wrong in a specific and predictable way: each location buys its own printer, picks its own stock, and within two years there are four card designs and nobody can tell which sites a given badge should open.

Standardizing the card design, the stock and the credential format across sites is worth doing early. It is much cheaper than reconciling it later.

How you distribute the printing is a separate question. Some companies centralise issuance and mail badges out. Some put a printer at each site. A common middle path is one good printer at head office for the bulk of issuance and simpler machines at the larger sites for replacements. Our printer finder and the full range of ID card printers will help size each of those.

Visitors and contractors

Visitor badges should not look like employee badges, and the difference should be obvious from across a lobby. Different color, large VISITOR band, and a printed date.

Plenty of firms use pre-printed visitor stock and write on it. Others print on demand from the same machine, which lets the badge carry the visitor name, the host, and the date, and looks considerably more professional to the visitor. Either is defensible; the on-demand version is worth the extra step if you have client traffic.

Contractors on long engagements sit somewhere in between and usually need a card that carries an access credential with a genuine expiry. Printing those in house is the practical way to keep the dates honest.

Choosing the printer

For most corporate programs a dual-sided direct-to-card printer with the right encoder is the answer. It is quick, cheap to run per card, and covers the photo ID and access credential in a single pass.

Retransfer is worth considering if your cards carry a chip that sits slightly proud of the surface, or if the brand demands a genuinely premium finish. It costs more to buy and run, and for a standard employee badge that is usually money better spent elsewhere.

Volume is the other input. A company badging 50 people a year needs a very different machine from one badging 2,000. The printer buying guide works through it, and if you would rather just tell somebody your numbers, that works too.

Card stock and what it costs to run

Standard 30 mil PVC is what the overwhelming majority of corporate programs use, and it is what fits every badge holder, reel and clip on the market. Where a badge carries a magnetic stripe, we supply high-coercivity stock, which holds its encoding far better against the phone cases and bag clasps a badge lives next to.

The running cost is mostly ribbon. Ribbons are consumed per card, so a 300-print ribbon is a little over a box of cards, and knowing that number makes budgeting straightforward. Our ribbon and supply range lists the yield on everything we carry, and the card and credential range covers stock.

Keeping it working, and when to outsource

Clean the printer with every ribbon change. That one habit prevents most of the faults we are called about. Keep a spare ribbon and a cleaning kit on the shelf so a Monday morning problem does not become a Wednesday problem.

We are an authorized service center with a bench in Woodridge, so repairs use genuine parts. See printer repair, and drivers and support for the software side.

If you would rather not run the equipment at all, we print and encode cards and ship them finished, which suits a scheduled company-wide rebadge or a new office opening. That is on the card printing service page. Many companies do both: send the big rebadge out, keep a printer for the day-to-day.