How does one of the largest universities in Australia go from using plastic to digital campus cards?

In 2022, the University of Sydney came to Beep with a challenge – to help them find a way to replace their existing and outdated plastic campus card system with a more secure, more cost effective and easy to manage solution. The obvious answer… go digital.

However, switching a university with 70,000+ students from plastic to digital campus cards is no easy feat. Despite being one of the few universities in the world to have a very talented in-house software development team at its disposal, building a platform for daily use by nearly 100,000 people is a monumental task. Once you factor build time, hosting, maintenance and testing in to the equation, it becomes a costly and time consuming project for any organisation – and that is before carrying out integrations with other ‘on campus’ systems or opening a door. In short, building a platform in-house just isn’t feasible, especially for a university that is wanting to move quickly.

So – what is the solution? Thankfully, that is where Beep comes in. We are experts in providing digital campus card solutions to universities and we were able to support the University of Sydney with the switch over to digital. Having already built the platform and integrated with the university’s security provider, we were able to provide the University of Sydney with a working version of the Beep platform within weeks of our first engagement. As with all clients, the Beep platform worked as a ‘drop-in’ solution for the university – meaning it was instantly able to work with the existing security infrastructure on campus, and the university could distribute credentials and manage the platform all through their existing security software.

In addition to getting the university set up with their digital campus cards, we were also able to help them understand what was involved in getting the university switched over to a digital system. This included everything from identifying readers that would need upgrading on campus to understanding all their use cases for campus cards such as library, gym etc. to ensure these could be carried across.

User Experience

A proof of concept was successfully implemented at the university with a cross section of staff. The platform as a whole had an incredibly positive response – with many individuals stating that using Beep was far more practical than using a plastic card.

The digital card itself is designed to only be noticed for its ease of use and otherwise remain seamless in its integration at the university, allowing staff to continue with their daily routines on campus as usual. In a survey conducted independently by the University of Sydney, it was reported that 95% of people at the university agreed that they would prefer to use a digital card on their phone over their plastic card.

User Experience By Numbers

Unlocking a City

Due to the size of the university and the number of buildings that make up its many campuses, the University of Sydney had a unique challenge. Instead of having a digital card that would work on a single site, the university required a single platform that would work across multiple buildings. With plastic cards, this presents a logistical nightmare for both maintenance and distribution.

Happily, the Beep platform has been developed deliberately to make distribution and maintenance easy, with digital campus cards being distributed ‘over-the-air (OTA)’ to student and staff smartphones, removing the need for costly and carbon heavy manufacture and distribution.

The Beep platform allows users to store multiple credentials on the app, enabling individuals to access multiple locations using a single smartphone. Now, even if a student or staff member needs to visit multiple sites requiring different access cards, these can now all be controlled through the Beep platform – making multiple cards a thing of the past.