Access cards for staff, a paper log for contractors: what we saw at 94 plants

The morning shift arrives at the gatehouse

Six twenty in the morning, and the morning shift is starting. Employees tap their access cards at the turnstile and the attendance system knows they are in. Meanwhile a contractor's technician, here to repair a press, stands at the gatehouse window. The guard hands over the visitor log, and the technician writes down his name, company and time of arrival. He signs, gets a card and walks into a hall he has never seen.

For an EHS manager this is an ordinary day. Employee records work, and signing in at the gatehouse has always been there. On our calls we often hear that everything is still on paper. We wanted to know how common this is.

What we saw at 94 plants

We went through recorded sales calls with 94 manufacturing and logistics plants, from February 2025 to October 9, 2026. For 64 of them we know how they record both employees and visitors. Of those 64 plants:

• 97% give employees electronic access,
• 66% record visitors and contractors on paper or in Excel,
• 62% do both at once: employees use an access card, contractors and visitors sign in by hand.

At these plants, visitors go into a paper book at 61%, a purchased system at 25%, an in‑house app at 6% and Excel at 5%. At 3% nobody records them.

A guard or security officer staffs the entrance at 49 of the 61 plants where we know. A typical plant sees 15 external people a day (the median across 31 plants).

How we counted: we classified each plant from the full call transcript, and every value rests on a sentence from the customer. The sample is not representative: we reached out to most of these plants ourselves, and these were sales calls, not a survey. The numbers show what we see at entrances, not statistics for the whole market.

What international studies show

Similar surveys come mostly from the US. Both below were made with FacilityOS, a US visitor management software vendor:

• ASIS International study published with FacilityOS, 2026: 637 security managers worldwide, only 7% of them in manufacturing. 60% record visitors in software, 23% on paper or in a spreadsheet.
• EHSLeaders survey for FacilityOS, 2026: 114 EHS professionals in manufacturing, chemicals, construction, logistics and other industries. 40% record external people in a paper log book, 25% in software.

Each study phrases its questions differently, so the figures can only be compared approximately. The difference still shows. Security managers across industries mostly record visitors in software. Where EHS people were asked, paper leads, and in our calls with manufacturing it leads by even more.

Why it matters when something happens

As long as nothing happens, the paper log does the job. But it holds exactly the people who know the site and its risks least: the technician at the press, the welder on the hall roof, the electrician in the switch room.

In an evacuation, supervisors have their own people in the attendance system. Only the log at the gatehouse shows which contractors are still inside, and it was left behind. When a contractor's worker is injured, someone searches a binder for the signature under the safety induction. On a call with a foundry, it came out like this: “It's nice that he gets the paper, but we have no proof anywhere that he actually got it.”

For employees, plants have the answer in the attendance system. For people who don't know the site, the paper at the gatehouse holds it.