We are seeing several of our largest multi-location and multinational customers being forced to take on great expenses to hire outside firms to help them develop global security standards and very elaborate RFI and RFP processes in an attempt to leverage multiple installing and servicing VAR resources on a job by job basis,” says John Nemerofsky, Vice President of Global Vertical Market Solutions for STANLEY Security. “We are being told that this not only raises costs, but detracts from the core competence of the security team left managing multiple projects and different integrators. From the integrator perspective, extensive RFP responses add further complexity and expense to the job that will need to be recuperated, encouraging creative practices in the gray areas to be competitive.
“The government trend is to achieve compliance at the lowest possible cost; focused on their primary mission (like the Veteran Administration’s role is to take care of their veterans), compliance is not the highest priority. It is understood that requirements must be met, but customers in this field are looking for out-of-the-box thinking and creative solutions to help them stretch the dollar as far as possible.”