Should I hire a company for ID badges or make them in-house? [closed]

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I work in human resources for a company and wondering if I should order our employee badges from a company or make them in-house? I've done quite a bit of research and it seems like outsourcing them could get expensive. Does anybody have experience with this?

Thanks!

manpreet 2 years ago

Depends on what you want out of them? What are you trying to achieve?

If you just want badges with pictures">pictures on them so that everyone knows everyone else's name, but you're not concerned about physical security, go for it and make them in house. A good quality plastic badge printer is likely to be pretty cheap, and you're just taking a digital picture and printing it on a badge.

OTOH - most of the places I work use id badges for much more than assisting everyone in knowing each other, the badges can unlock doors, get people by human guards, and might even denote the right to hear certain private information to have unique privileges based on job function. Spoofing them would have serious consquences for the company. At that point, the technology involved may be a lot more expensive (even in-house) than you think - you want audit logging of electronic access, badges that are compatible with door card readers, a way of canceling badges that are lost, stolen or issued to employees who have left the company, etc. You'll want to think out what your business hours access is and how it differs from your off-hours access...

At that point, which option is cheap/easy really deserves some analysis with the perspective that you don't want to issue these badges just once, it's an ongoing system.