Who Controls Your Guarding Program?
Relying on vendor-supplied reports and intuition leaves guarding programs vulnerable to massive billing discrepancies and unverified coverage gaps.
After more than 25 years in software and technology, I can tell within the first 15 minutes of meeting with a company whether its large-scale guarding program is operating proactively or simply reacting to problems.
The telltale signs appear after I ask a simple question: "How are you scheduling your guards today?" They typically say that they use complex formulas with an Excel spreadsheet. I follow up by asking, ‘How do you get all your data from all your different guarding companies?’ They respond that they ‘consolidate it and generate reports.’
This leads to asking how they decide where guards belong (i.e., how do you know what shift and location each guard should occupy). Many times, they answer that ‘if we’ve had a problem there, we put a guard there.’ Other than that, I hear the word “feel” frequently, as in “we just feel like we need guards at that location.”
Relying on intuition for guard scheduling is a sign that the company is scheduling manually and isn’t consolidating their data. Over 70% of the companies I meet with are intuitively managing manual processes through spreadsheets, emails, and reports produced by their guarding vendors.
My company recently onboarded a major logistics company that contracted with outside guarding vendors, which told them the number of hours required but not when the guards were to be scheduled, leaving the guarding firm free to schedule whenever they wanted. We acquired and deciphered the guarding company's schedules and created new schedules for our client so they could manage the guarding company. Across hundreds of locations, we discovered that approximately 40% of schedules did not align with their corresponding work orders, with discrepancies in both over- and under-scheduled hours.
Reactive vs. Aware Organizations
With a reactive program, security teams respond after an open post, late arrival, incident, or billing discrepancy has already created a problem. With information gathered manually, employees often spend hours reconciling emails, spreadsheets, and conflicting vendor reports.
As most guarding companies have their own systems and definitions, the reactive client lacks a consistent enterprise-wide view.
Aware organizations use alerts, notifications, and software tools to identify issues sooner. The team prioritizes the exceptions that demand immediate attention. When every organization defines coverage, attendance and performance differently, consistency becomes impossible. Establishing standardized definitions for scheduled hours, verified hours, open posts, late arrivals, unfilled shifts, overtime and service-level failures creates a common foundation for measuring performance across every location.
Receiving Vendor Data vs. Independently Verifying It
The biggest mistake security leaders make is treating their guarding provider's performance reports as fact without independently validating the data behind them.
When organizations lack an independent assurance layer with visibility into guarding performance, critical issues can go undetected. Recurring coverage failures, billing discrepancies and scheduling inefficiencies become difficult to identify, let alone resolve.
Optimized: Connecting Risk, Performance, Spending & Human Oversight
Organizations advance from reactive to optimized by creating clear standards, retaining control of their data, and establishing accountability across every guarding vendor. With an optimized program, security, operations, finance, and executive leadership can evaluate how guarding resources affect risk, performance, and cost.
Security leaders need to look beyond whether an officer worked their scheduled hours. While verifying coverage is essential, the real value comes from using that data to compare performance across locations and providers, identify opportunities for improvement and make more informed decisions about which vendor relationships to strengthen, expand or reconsider.
Consider Dave & Buster’s, an American entertainment restaurant chain. Using integrated and centralized security performance data, the company consolidated its vendor network from 18 providers to 13, shifting business toward partners that consistently met expectations.
Expanding those relationships created opportunities to load balance their program and gain internal efficiencies, resulting in over $400,000 in annual savings. The savings didn’t come from billing discrepancies, but from their ability to make informed decisions about who provided security, where they operated, and how those relationships were structured.
Ultimately, security leaders should be able to answer five fundamental questions: Was the coverage delivered? Are providers performing consistently? Does the operational data align with the financials? Where are the emerging risks? And are we getting the return we expect from our guarding investment? If your answers depend solely on vendor-generated reports or time-consuming manual reconciliation, your program is exposed.
The path forward to an optimized organization that connects risk, performance, and spending is to ensure that analytics identifies recurring coverage failures, billing discrepancies, inefficient post schedules, and locations that require additional man-hours. Optimization puts the right resources at the right location during the right times based on verified need.