A Rugged Solution for Real-Time Reporting By Jeff Goldman
Toronto, Canada-based Intelligarde International, a 30-year-old private security guard and investigations company, has long used BlackBerry devices for its management staff's email and voice communications -- but more recently, the company began deploying a more complex BlackBerry solution for its entire guard force.
James M. Kinnaird, the company's manager of business development, says Intelligarde began looking for a real-time reporting solution for its guards back in 2008. "The president of the company and I were both lovers of BlackBerry for communications, for email, for its secure 256-bit encryption and for the BES... and I had come across a product called EnterMo, which was in the early stages of going to market," he says.
Kinnaird says the combination of the BlackBerry with the EnterMoCase, a rugged barcode scanning and signature capture case for BlackBerry devices, seemed like a perfect fit. "The idea was to build a guard tour system around this ruggedized device -- because security staff... can be very hard on electronics and devices, so we had to have a product that would put up with some abuse," he says.
And while Intelligarde also considered deploying rugged Windows Mobile devices, Kinnaird says the BlackBerry/EnterMo combination was the obvious choice. "The issue for us was not that the Windows operating system was problematic, but that it didn't have the same benefits as the BlackBerry operating system did in terms of the controls that we could place on our workforce with the BES," he says.
After some testing, Kinnaird recalls, they realized they needed customized software to help the solution meet their needs. "We found a company called SkyNet, a global GPS positioning provider, and we asked them to build a product suite... which included barcode scanning, signature capture and photograph capture, for the BlackBerry/EnterMo combo," he says.
The resulting solution, Kinnaird says, provides everything the company had been seeking. "It became a guard tour system reporting live in real time, uploading instantly to the SkyNet app any barcodes, signatures, photographs, what have you -- and we built some scheduling features and some exception reporting around that," he says.
For the company's guards, the solution provides guidance throughout their shift. "The GPS suite will take them to whatever the work site is, whether it's a commercial building or a transport truck yard or a retail premises or a residential tower," Kinnaird says. "And if they're a mobile guard... we're following them in the GPS suite, and we can see where they're going and how fast they're going."
The barcode scanning functionality can then be used to track guards inside a building as well. "Around the premises, we will have installed barcodes at strategic points which compel the guards to go to, say, the second floor stairwell, and scan the barcode," Kinnaird says. "If they miss barcodes at a particular premises, we get exception reporting back saying they haven't done something."
On the average shift, Kinnaird says, the company has about 150 guards deployed. "I would say that about half of the guards out there right now are equipped with the EnterMo/SkyNet/BlackBerry combination -- with the intent that, by the end of this year, 100 percent of our guard force will have the deployment," he says.
Soon after Intelligarde's initial deployment, Kinnaird says, a City of Toronto civic strike in the summer of 2009 put the solution to the test. "In that strike, we had 140 guards out on deployment for about six weeks," he says. "All of those guards were equipped with EnterMo units, and our mobile supervisors were also equipped with the EnterMo units."
During the 2009 strike, Kinnaird says, the company billed the City of Toronto for about $1 million. "We had previously been involved in two separate strikes with the City of Toronto some years before, and one of the issues had always been getting paid... because of their really, really rigorous accounting procedures," he says. "This time around, we didn't have a single dollar challenged."
As a result, Kinnaird says, the expense of the deployment was very easy to justify. "In a typical month, a security company like Intelligarde will write off many hundreds or sometimes thousands of dollars to either unbillable hours that can't be supported by paperwork from the guards, or where the client challenges the veracity of a particular document," he says.
And so a real time electronic reporting solution like this, Kinnaird says, can be extremely effective. "We've seen a huge reduction in the amount of chargebacks or claimbacks by clients -- so probably over the course of one to two years, we'll see an ROI on our complete fleet deployment," he says.
The deployment was such a success, Kinnaird says, that Intelligarde launched a sister company, Tec-Garde, to market the EnterMo/SkyNet solution. "We started identifying verticals... and did a bunch of research into other devices -- and Tec-Garde was born," he says. "Since that time, we've added a bunch of different mobility productivity software solutions, and several other hardware devices as well."
