Fourteen sites, fourteen contractors, and no two systems the same.

The situation

A manufacturer with fourteen locations, built up over roughly 5 to 8 years. Each site had been fitted out by whoever was local at the time, under whoever was managing that plant. The result was fourteen separate systems, fourteen contracts, five recording platforms and no common specification.

Head office could not answer basic questions. How many cameras did the company own? What was the retention anywhere? Which sites had working fire interlocks? Every answer required fourteen phone calls, and the answers that came back were not comparable with each other.

What we found

Across the estate	Position	Consequence
Recording platforms	5 different	No engineer could work across the estate. Every site needed its own specialist
Retention	Varied widely	No group standard, and nobody at head office could say which site held what
Maintenance contracts	11 active, 1 lapsed	One site had no cover and nobody at head office knew which
Fire interlocks	Verified at 2 sites	At the other twelve, nobody could produce a test record
Spares and consumables	No commonality	Nothing could be held centrally. Every failure was a fresh procurement
Reporting	None consolidated	Head office had no view of its own estate

The individual systems were mostly adequate. Two were genuinely poor and one was better than anything we would have specified. The problem was not quality at any single site: it was that the estate had no standard, so it could not be managed, budgeted or improved as an estate.

Every site was somebody's decision. No site was anybody's design.

What happened next

All fourteen sites were assessed to one methodThe same six stages, the same report format, so that for the first time the results could be laid side by side.
A group specification was writtenOne standard for camera selection, retention, detection and interlocks, with a defined tolerance for what each site type actually needs. A warehouse and a process area are not the same problem.
Sites were sequenced against risk, not against ageThe two poor sites first, the lapsed contract second, and the interlock verification across all fourteen as a single programme.
Consolidated to one contract and one reporting lineHead office now receives a single monthly report across the estate, and can answer the questions it could not answer before.
Spares are held centrallyPossible only because the specification is now common. This alone changed the response time at the sites furthest from Mumbai.

The outcome

It appeared as fourteen separate procurement exercises a year, as spares nobody could share, as a lapsed contract nobody had noticed, and as a fire interlock position that could not be evidenced at twelve locations if anyone had asked.

The cost of that was not obvious on any single invoice.

What this is an example of

Every multi-site organisation we work with arrived in roughly this condition, because estates are not built: they accumulate. Each individual decision was reasonable when it was made and the aggregate is unmanageable.

The work is not usually replacement. It is establishing a standard, measuring everything against it, and sequencing the gap by risk. Most of what exists can stay.

On the figures

We do not name the buildings or organisations in our case studies.

The figures are from the job file and are unaltered. Names go on the client list, because a client is proud to appear there. Numbers go here, because nobody is proud to appear in a report about what was broken on their site.

If you would like to speak to a reference, we will ask them first.

Find out what your system is actually doing.

Every camera, panel, reader and sensor tested, and a signed condition report naming what has failed.

The assessment is chargeable, quoted against the site, and adjusted in full against the first year if you take cover. Where cover is not taken, the fee covers our team’s time on site and the report we leave behind, and the report is yours either way.

Book an assessment Or WhatsApp