It’s now the busiest time of year at your facility. The stress level is up and the projects don’t seem to end. Even when you get caught up, the next day you feel behind all over again.
Today you walk in the office already prepared for a hectic day and to fuel the fire you notice a voicemail from your facility’s legal counsel notifying you that a slip-and-fall case has been filed against your facility…and the incident occurred three years ago. Who documented the incident? Do they work here anymore? Where's it filed? Is it legible?
Take some pressure off you and your team. Introduce facility management solutions to provide you and your risk management team with accurate documentation for incident liability defense. While doing so you’ll reap these benefits:

1. Eliminate often illegible handwritten notes.
2. If notes need to be accessed in the future, no need to find the employee that wrote them to decipher them...and that's if they still work at your site.
3. If multiple departments are involved in the response, the paperwork is stored in a central repository.
4. You can attach and quickly reference documents (pictures, videos, statements, etc.) with each incident.
5. Ability to generate reports to spot trends and be better prepared for future events.
6. Digital records are generally accepted in liability defense, unlike handwritten notes which may not be.
7. All changes made to incident reports are automatically tracked which strengthens liability defense.
8. Descriptions of incident types are uniform since a drop down menu is utilized where everything is labeled the same.

In summary, successful liability defense is a notable result of effectively and accurately documenting incidents. Files are not fragmented throughout multiple departments, and all relevant documents associated to an incident are accessible. It should be just as easy to reference an incident record five years from now as it is five days from now.
Accurate, legible, and historical records provide substantial benefits to reducing your risk and managing your facility! To find out more about how we help you accomplish all this click on the Button below.

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For a Guard Tour System to be great, it clearly needs to make your life easier. There are number of ways in which a quality system does this.
Reducing Training Time and Costs
Because instructions can be made available to the officer as needed when they reach a checkpoint, your training time is drastically reduced both for new officers and experienced officers covering a shift. When an incident occurs, the system should display an easy to use form allowing the officer to gather and input information as it happens, and even allow them to submit photographic evidence as needed.
Easier Reporting
The system will remove management overhead and save you time with report writing. A Guard Tour System, and particularly a smartphone based one, will save a lot of overhead through automation. Your officers are able to enter information as it happens, and make sure they get all the details into the system in a quick and efficient manner. This is made even easier today by the huge advances that have been made in voice-to-text technology allowing individuals to dictate notes directly, allowing them to record their observations on the go without stopping to type!
You will no longer be manually writing reports but having them generated from incident reports and observations uploaded to the cloud. Great systems will automatically email out daily activity reports to your clients, saving you even more time.
Improved Situational Awareness
You get much better situational awareness of what your employees are doing on a minute to minute basis when using this type of system. Particularly with smartphone based systems, you will be able to pinpoint on a map where your officers are at any given moment in real-time.  You can also see incidents as they happen together with photographic and video evidence available within seconds to minutes of being reported. This improved situational awareness also translates into better officer safety. When an officer is in trouble, they can immediately initiate an alarm back to headquarters. Since you know where all the other officers are, it is easy to send backup or inform authorities that the individual needs help.
Better Compliance
A good system will help you comply with laws. There are many laws out there (Duty of Care) that require you to keep detailed records of the hours worked by your employees.  Using the time and attendance features of a good guard tour management system, you will not only have accurate records, but automatically keep them for as long as required by law without any extra effort on your part as they will all be available in the cloud.
Going Paperless
​The system can save you money by vastly reducing paper usage. It’s not just the triplicate and quadruplicate copies of paper forms that costs you money but the storage needed to keep it for years to protect yourself legally and provide records for clients who ask for it. By using a cloud based system, all your tours and reports are kept safely and indefinitely saving you a vast amount of effort and cost.  

​In our next Post we will look at the Big Picture- How does all this data collected give you a broader picture on how your operation is performing.

Thanks for coming back for Post 2 on "What makes a Great Guard Tour System".

Factors in choosing a Guard Tour System
There are two main types of Guard Tour systems, those based on proprietary hardware (often referred to as “wands”), and those based on smartphone technology.

In the case of a wand-based system, the checkpoints are typically RFID tags or steel “buttons”.  Each button or tag contains a microchip with a unique serial number ID.Since they are the only form of input, the officer will have a personal button/tag to login/start, then will perform the patrol reading the checkpoints at each location visited. If there is an incident, he might be able to classify it using a different set of buttons specifically programmed for incidents. These devices are only designed to read buttons- there is no way to capture any other details of an incident. By the end of the patrol, or after several patrols, the wand needs to either communicate over a network or be connected to a computer (by means of a “Downloader” device) directly so the information can be transferred locally or to the cloud for reporting purposes.

In the case of a smartphone based system, the checkpoints are either QR/Barcodes or NFC tags. NFC tags work similarly to RFID in that they each have a unique ID that cannot be duplicated, while QR codes and barcodes are easier to reproduce and copy. In contrast to the buttons, however, location specific information and interactive elements can ALSO be associated with the NFC tag. When the checkpoint is read by the phone, information such as instructions, memos, digital forms and checklists can be sent to the user to view and complete as required. This really has a huge advantage in terms of training, and the officer can then enter details or even take pictures as needed. This data is sent in real-time over the internet to the cloud for reporting. With this solution, you combine simplified communication, efficient training and accountability with ease of use.

When deciding which path to take, you really have to look at several issues such as cost, durability and functionality.
 
Wand based systems have one real advantage in that they are custom built and therefore can be very rugged. On the other hand, smartphones offer a lot more in terms of functionality in that they have a screen, interactive capability, are connected full time to the internet, and have useful built-in hardware such as GPS and cameras.
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That’s not counting the most obvious feature of a smartphone- it’s a phone and therefore a communication device. This reduces the need for guards to carry around excess equipment, as there is no need to carry a radio. The ruggedness concern of a phone can often be mitigated by putting it in a suitable case.

​In our next Post, we will look at the the increase in accountability, productivity and insight gained from utilizing a Guard Tour System.