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 Commitment
Versus Cost
By Michael Petty, GuardTrax
In a complicated economy, a conundrum that security providers are ever concerned with is commitment versus cost. The commitment of monitoring and managing security personnel, their service level and activities 24 hours a day, 7 days a week while at the same time being conscious of cost. What is the commitment that contract security firms make to their customers in the way of supervision and management, and at the same time, what is the commitment that contract security firms make to their own employees – many of whom work in lone worker settings at various times of the day and night.
At this year’s ASSIST Conference and Exhibition, GuardTrax unveiled the new GT2 Security Force Locator. An elegant device for a complicated conundrum. As many security providers around the country are finding, the GT2 allows providers to make and keep their commitment to customers and employees that they will monitor and manage their employees in “realtime,” at all times. By utilizing the GPS and RFID features of the GT2, keeping up with your officer’s location and activities on a remote property, whether indoors or outdoors has never been easier including the retrieval of historical reports and patrol history from the previous shift, previous week or previous month.
In my travels and discussions with security service firms around the country, I find many common conundrums not the least of which is monitoring security officer activity in the field. Security providers make a commitment to their customers that their officers are not alone but have support staff and supervisors to monitor their activity day and night.
Although there are differing opinions about security officer performance and effectiveness while at work, some recent data suggests that average security officer performance while on the job is 57% productive. This would suggest that both the customer and the security provider are incurring significant losses due to unproductive shifts. Supervisors and support staff are then utilized to perform “post checks” or make phone calls to verify officer performance and productivity. The conundrum then becomes that supervisors can only be at one place at one time and that having more and more supervisors in vehicles is cost prohibitive.
Just as GPS guides us in our decision making in driving our cars or assists with our club selection on the golf course, so is GPS being used to guide our decision making in security officer management. Being able to see in real time that an officer is spending too much time in one area and not enough time in another area is precisely the kind of data that security management professionals need to have at their disposal to increase the productivity and effectiveness of their services.
For less than $3 per day, GuardTrax enables security providers to monitor an officer’s location and activity up to 720 times per day. Each communication from the GuardTrax device paints a vivid picture of the service level that is being rendered at a customer location.
CEO and president of Sun City Security Service, Inc., Dave Scepanski, concurs, adding that, “We have already benefitted from this state-of-the-art guard management solution and our clients will greatly benefit from its real-time RFID tracking capabilities.” According to Scepanski, “Prior to using GuardTrax, data from each guard’s tour wand was manually downloaded into the software program only after the shift was completed, and often times not until the next day. Our guard tour wands frequently crashed and were unreliable since they depended on guards to correctly touch checkpoints to record information.”
Commitment versus cost does not have to be a conundrum. Technology can greatly augment security services and your commitment to customers and employees can be kept by effectively monitoring and managing your security personnel in any corner of the globe from any corner of the globe.
At next year’s ASSIST Conference and Exhibition; GuardTrax will be utilizing the RFID functionality of the GT2 to document those attending the conference and the specific meetings at the conference by scanning personal RFID badges that will be issued to attendees. We look forward to seeing you next October.
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