Discovery Bay International School

THE CLIENT

Discovery Bay International School (DBIS) is a unique British International School with a warm welcoming community feel in the heart of tranquil Discovery Bay on Lantau Island in Hong Kong. The school has nearly 1200 students from over 40 countries aged from 3 to 18.  It follows the English National Curriculum starting in Early Years through to iGCSEs and A-Levels in the Secondary School.

THE CHALLENGE

DBIS has three campuses and needed a solution that would quickly identify where their senior students and staff were in the event of an evacuation. They also needed a better tracking system for visitors to replace their paper-based process.

The school also needed a solution which provided a read and write-back integration with their MIS (iSAMs), as well as a solution which had proven reliability in other International Schools; InVentry gave them just that!

THE SOLUTION

Discovery Bay now have a state-of-the art system, whereby staff and sixth form students can sign in and out between the sixth form and main site campuses. This has transformed the way in which the school has been able to manage emergency evacuations as each campus now has the ability to pull accurate evacuation records that can be accessed quickly during an emergency.

With the school now capturing the sign in data for all onsite arrivals including contractors and parents, Discovery Bay can check who is on their premises at any given time which has had a significant impact on the school’s security and ability to enhance student safeguarding.

By installing an electronic sign in system, DBIS can welcome visitors onsite with confidence with the ability to pre-book visitors and ensure that on-site arrivals have read and understood the school’s fire and safety procedures before signing into the building. The ability to print visitor badges and clearly identify those on-site is another plus for DBIS. Visitors like the new quick sign in process and the issuing of family cards to DBIS family members has helped to augment the feeling of being part of the school community – an important part of the DBIS ethos.

Sheila Stamp, Director of IT and Communications commented:

“InVentry has improved our visitor experience enormously.Our previous visitor registration process had been a pain-point for parents when visiting the school.

Security checking of general visitors has now been streamlined and the InVentry solution also enables us to know exactly where our sixth form and secondary staff are on campus at any given time.”

“We found the InVentry team very professional and helpful throughout the installation. It was a difficult time as COVID-19 arrived just before the UK team were due to fly over to complete our installation. A lot of uncharted waters were sailed both by us and by InVentry over the following month as we worked together to finish the installation without on-site support, during a global pandemic. The system is now up and running and InVentry has been very good at supporting us remotely despite the eight-hour time difference. We would be happy to recommend InVentry, both as a solution and a company.”