Talk with contract guarding people and the chances are that procurement will crop up, writes Mark Rowe.
In the April print edition of Professional Security Magazine, courtesy of Carlisle Support Services who invited us to their day for staff and clients in Manchester, we got to hear from a procurement manager. As we remarked, to hear or even see a procurement person in public or semi-public at a security gathering is noteworthy. Security people can be guilty of treating what they do as a ‘dark art’ even to a Walter Mitty extent, possibly as a way of avoiding scrutiny. Is procurement a ‘dark art’ also?
It may get so that you wonder if procurement is a game. Whatever the guarding firm says when responding to a tender, the procurement manager may ask if the firm can ‘sharpen its pencil’; in other words, trim a little. Is the procurement person saying that as a ritual, to justify their position? At least one old hand in guarding on occasion will (with the client’s agreement) add five per cent to what they’re proposing, so that when procurement queries, the proposal can be trimmed five per cent and everyone remains happy.
If security or other services are largely about people, and a contract in money terms is largely about their wages, it follows that a procurement person is looking to drive down the cost of officers’ wages. Hence guarding companies try to make the case to clients the reasons for keeping, or even increasing, pay rates, of guards who may well be paid, and live, from month to month. Therefore if a client thinks that they have to, or can afford to, pay less for guards, and still receive a service, it’s the guards, more quickly and more directly than any guarding company, that suffers from a procurer’s ‘drive to the bottom’.
A client may not notice any difference in the service; they may be lucky, and not fall victim to a crime, or fire. Or they may only find out that they’re receiving a lesser service in an incident – not even an act of terrorism, but something mundane, such as a leaky roof, left unreported – because things never seem to go wrong in office hours, but when the security officer is the only person on site – that leads to a flood, and a disruption, which brings costs – not so much the cost of repair, but the cost of interrupted operations.
However you classify the leading ten or 20 guarding companies, large and small, even though they are competitors and naturally will talk up what they offer, they will acknowledge that each provides a good quality service; because each has competent and experienced managers, equipment, a back-up control room, a service culture. That’s good for clients, whatever choice among the ‘top ten’ or 20 they make. The difficulty for the guarding sector though: how does one of those companies, or other, able and ambitious guard firms, differentiate themselves in a crowded market (the number of SIA-approved contractors ebbs and flows, around 800) and resist the pressure to drive down cost, or drive out costs – check-calls, management visits – altogether?
Procurement Bill
A Procurement Bill going through Parliament is in its final stages, covering the £300 billion of goods, services and works that UK Government buys each year. For background, visit the website of the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply (CIPS).
