July 29, 2025 Modern Visitor Security for Today’s Manufacturers

New tech-driven visitor tools help manufacturers protect people, property, and IP while creating safer, smarter facilities.

By Temi Erinoso & Richard Hills

A seemingly harmless factory tour that turns into an opportunity for industrial espionage. An unscreened vendor with a hidden agenda who walks away with sensitive production details, or intentionally inflicts damage to property.

A security breach like this can be devastating to a manufacturer, whether it results in the loss of intellectual property, operational downtime, lost revenue, damage to a company’s reputation and relationships, or even physical harm to a building and the people and assets within it. Scenarios like this unfold every day, confronting manufacturers with risks they can’t afford to ignore.

Addressing the physical and cyber risks that manufacturers face takes a sophisticated, modern approach to visitor management, one that accounts for both the who (the people you physically let into your buildings) and the what (the risks to which your organization is exposed via its digital infrastructure). The good news for manufacturers and their site managers, operations teams and security staff is that a new wave of intelligent, powerful, cost-efficient and easy-to-implement visitor management capabilities is ready to deploy. Here’s a look at five that are proving particularly valuable to manufacturers, whether they have one facility to manage or multiple:

1. Intelligent risk alerts. On any given day, your facilities could be host to temporary and seasonal workers, contractors, vendor representatives, service providers, corporate partners, customers, prospects and other members of the public, all of whom present some degree of risk. Intelligent capabilities inside a visitor management solution can prescreen visitors before they arrive by examining multiple compliance watchlists, including export restricted and denied persons lists, sanctioned entities and blocked persons lists, and even international terrorist watchlists, then provide appropriate employees with alerts if there’s a compliance gap or other red flag that warrants denying a person entry. For companies with multiple facilities, it’s an effective yet non-intrusive way to address security risks and thwart breaches that can occur as a result of inconsistent screening, vague access policies, and poor oversight.
   
   
2. Centralized multi-site management. Recognizing that fragmented and inconsistent security practices and protocols across its multiple locations were inviting gaps, blind spots, and errors that elevated risk, one global food processing company took steps to standardize contractor management compliance processes across its facilities to ensure every contractor meets regulations as well as the organization’s internal requirements. As a result, the company now can enforce higher health and safety policy standards at all its locations. Having a centralized platform from which to implement unified core visitor policies across multiple sites, with the flexibility to tailor requirements to specific locations as needed (such as requiring visitors to sign an NDA during preregistration, a common practice for manufacturers in verticals like aerospace and high-tech), is critical to a manufacturer’s ability to manage risk. Such a platform also provides a single source of truth for all a company’s visitor data, which comes in handy for compliance, reporting, and trend-spotting.
   
   
3. Touchless, ID-verified check-Ins. Manual, analog check-in processes not only put a heavy burden on receptionists and security personnel, and create vulnerabilities, they also can be a time-wasting turn-off to people entering a facility. One manufacturing company exec told me that before their organization went touchless with its check-in processes, it wasn’t unusual for roving employees to encounter one-hour delays to sign-in — with their own employer, no less. As a pivotal control point in visitor management, sign-in is where risk is either defused or escalated. Having touchless, mobile-enabled digital check-in, with advance ID verification, cuts bottlenecks and eliminates the vulnerabilities that come with relying on old-fashioned sign-in sheets and kiosks. It also creates opportunities for a company to leave visitors with a lasting positive impression. When contractors sign in at a facility owned by the aforementioned food processing company, for example, they do so via a fully branded, customized tablet-based interface that conveys a sense of professionalism.
   
   
4. Tools to deliver seamless, high-touch, personalized experiences. The emphasis with visitor management should always be on security and addressing risk. But don’t overlook the positive impact that a high-quality visitor experience — curated with a visitor management system — can have on the overall perception of your company and brand. That experience starts at your company’s “front door,” whether that initial access point is an actual building entrance, a loading dock or even a virtual meeting room, and continues through visitor sign-out. Throughout that experience, visitor management capabilities can work behind the scenes to provide concierge-type visitor interactions that include personalized services and high-end flourishes. Have a visitor with a nut allergy coming in for a lunch meeting? Your visitor management system can gather that kind of information and ensure appropriate people in your organization are aware. The same system can arrange for parking, speed check-ins, and answer questions throughout the day, functioning as a visitor’s personal guide or an employee’s personal assistant. These types of experiences reflect positively back on the company and brand, which in turn helps differentiate them in the eyes of potential hires and partners, and other visitors.
   
   
5. Tools to support compliance and reporting. As internal compliance requirements and regulatory responsibilities mount in the manufacturing world (NIST SP 800-53, FedRAMP, etc., in the U.S.; GDPR, etc., in Europe), it’s crucial that companies have the ability to confirm that regulatory forms are signed and access to facilities is tracked, while maintaining detailed, time-stamped visitor logs, collecting necessary documentation, and ensuring compliance with safety, legal, and industry regulations. Instead of scrambling to find, collect, verify, and share data, all that information is readily available, auditable and reportable because it resides in a centralized database.

As complex as many manufacturing operations have become with expansion, regulation, globalization, and varied, hybrid workforces, and as vital as intellectual property is to a manufacturer’s growth, there’s a strong business case to embrace the new wave of visitor management capabilities to safeguard your most valuable assets.

About the Authors:

Temi Erinoso is the vice president of customer success and account management for the SMB segment at Sign In Solutions. She’s responsible for defining and executing the post-sale strategy for SMB customers, including driving customer success outcomes, expanding product adoption, and building a scalable account management function that aligns with commercial and retention goals.

Richard Hills is vice president of advanced technologies at Sign In Solutions, where he heads up innovation projects and AI across the business, in particular how AI can be applied to real problems in visitor management.

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