Blog Building your visitor management Center of Excellence CoE

Building your Visitor Management Center of Excellence (CoE)

By Molly TelferContent Marketing Specialist
Published on February 9, 2022

Every company is different when it comes to how they manage visitors, collect data, and generate actionable insights. In order to maximize the functionality of a visitor management system, a company may form a Center of Excellence (CoE) to gather together executive stakeholders and subject matter experts (SMEs). Their work is to ensure the best metrics, keep abreast of compliance issues, and standardize the use of a VMS across their organization.

Let’s look at some of the details involved in building a Visitor Management System Center of Excellence (CoE).

What is a Center of Excellence (CoE)?

A Center of Excellence (CoE) has been defined by Gartner as units “concentrating existing expertise and resources in a discipline or capability to attain and sustain world-class performance and value.”

These centers can be virtual or physical, but the goal is to streamline access to advanced capabilities and expertise in a specific area of inquiry so that employees have access to all the information they need to become innovators. Centers of Excellence provide education, training, best practices, and oversight in their specific subject areas or capabilities.

Ideally, these Centers of Excellence also collect data in return from the employees that use them so they can create a positive feedback loop

Which stakeholders should be included in a visitor management Center of Excellence?

Because a visitor management solution is generally applicable to more than one department, a CoE can draw stakeholders from all over a company. But the one thing they should all have in common is their dedication to improving visitor experience and setting the standards for their own units as well as the whole company.

Departments generally send management-level employees to be part of their Center of Excellence because they have specific insight into the role of a visitor management system in their own unit as well as a big-picture vision of how this software can serve the company better.

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Steps to building a visitor management Center of Excellence (CoE)

As you decide how to staff your VMS CoE, you will want to tap Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) units; managers from Security, IT, sales & marketing, and human resources; as well as legal and compliance professionals. It will also be helpful to have a representative from your reception staff since they are the first faces your visitors see. Some CoEs involve external SMEs as well.

You will also need employee buy-in at nearly every level to implement a successful visitor management system. So a CoE will want to first discuss how to make the system both intuitive and useful for those who use it.

Topics that a CoE will deal with include:

  • The best way of recording relevant guest details
  • Ways of keeping up with COVID-19 compliance and people flow
  • The privacy of protected guest information related to health
  • The legality of safety waivers
  • The correct way to write a confidentiality agreement that still encourages cooperation and innovation
  • The best way of ensuring a good user expertise and training employees to use the tech
  • Providing central oversight as issues arise over time

Benefits of implementing a CoE

The CoE should help make the implementation of a VMS as simple as possible across the company to get the appropriate ROI. That might sound straightforward, but in most companies C-suite executives are still looking for ways to accelerate the speed of technological change. According to a 2018 PwC survey, 44% of CEOs reported being unsatisfied with this.

Meanwhile, McKinsey found that only 20% of companies have reached their full potential when it comes to implementing advanced analytics at scale. But all of the companies understood its importance.

Once you have identified a strong team, define clear goals for them, chosen the right software and decide on the hierarchy of permissions, and make plans to collect and revisit data on and VMS’s efficacy, you’re ready to start reaping the benefits of your CoE.

Ideally, your CoE will be successful in managing VMS metrics, training employees, establishing policies and strategies, implementing a VMS that makes employees’ jobs easier, measuring compliance, and generating new insights so the company’s technology can keep improving.


Interested in learning what implementing a Visitor Management System can do for your company? Book a free demo with a Sine expert today!

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