Making your life easier with the right Guard Tour System

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.