WestPoint · Technical support service
At three in the morning you find out whether there is a service desk.
24 × 7 support, preventive maintenance with dates, monitoring of the system so we find out before you do, and spares to hand. A technical service that only exists when you call is not a technical service: it is a phone number.
You call at three in the morning. What happens?
That is the whole question. Next to it, the rest of the maintenance contract is literature.
The warehouse alarm has gone off, or the whole system has fallen over, or there is a door that will not open with people inside. You pick up the maintenance phone and one of four things happens: a voicemail answers; a switchboard answers, takes a note of the call and passes it on in the morning; somebody answers who can do nothing until an engineer arrives at nine; or somebody answers who gets into the system while they are talking to you.
All four are written the same way in a quotation —24-hour support— and cost about the same when compared on a sheet, because on a sheet they are one line.
The difference shows once a year, and on that day it shows in full. That is why this page is not about what we offer: it is about the questions to ask before signing a maintenance contract. Of us as well.
What has to sit behind a 24 × 7.
Three things. If one is missing, the other two are no use at all.
The first is somebody who picks up at any hour and knows what they are being told about. Not a service that takes the message: somebody able to ask the first right question, which is almost always the one that saves the journey.
The second is being able to get into the system at that moment. Without remote access set up and tested, with its permission and its log, any problem gets resolved at the speed of a car. With it, a good share of incidents are over before you hang up.
And the third is that there is a route when the first two are not enough: who goes, with what, from where and with which part in the boot. That is not a promise, it is a written rota, and it is the hardest part to sustain — which is why so many people sell the first two and call it the same thing.
What gets fixed without going out, and what means going.
More gets fixed remotely than people expect. A service that has stopped, a setting somebody changed, a user who cannot log in, a recorder that has stopped talking to two cameras, an alert that stopped being sent because an email address changed. All of that is half an hour and nobody moves from where they are.
And there are things that cannot be fixed from a screen however much you would like: a broken drive, a burnt-out power supply, a cut cable, a camera turned by a lorry, a lens that has lost focus over the years, a dirty detector, a reader that has stopped reading. That means going, and the honest thing is to say so on the first call instead of keeping the client trying things on the phone for two hours.
The difference between an installation where almost everything is resolved remotely and one where almost everything means going out is not in the equipment: it is in whether there is access set up, documentation of what is there and somebody who knows the site. All three are prepared on installation day, when they cost nothing.
Finding out before you do.
Because a camera that has stopped seeing does not complain.
This is where real maintenance and a phone number part company most. A camera that has gone blind is still switched on and still sending an image: only the image is black, or the inside of the bag somebody hung over it. The recorder sees nothing odd, because it is receiving video. And nobody raises the alarm, because nobody watches forty screens.
Same with a drive that starts throwing errors, with a backup unit that no longer charges, with a cabinet that has been at forty-two degrees for a week or with a camera that restarts every night at four. They are warnings: the system is giving them and there is nobody listening.
Watching that means checking every day, automatically, that each camera is still there, that what it sends looks like what it sent yesterday, that the drives are healthy, that the recording covers the days it should and that the temperature is what it always is.
When an installation has that monitoring under contract, we open the alert and we call: nobody has to notice first. And when it does not, it is worth knowing and deciding, rather than discovering it on the day you need it — so it is one of the first things we put on the table when we talk about maintenance.
It is the difference between finding out that three weeks are missing from a camera on the day those three weeks were needed, and finding out the next morning.
Preventive with a date, and what gets done on each visit.
Maintenance that consists of coming when you call is corrective work under another name. This is the other thing, and it comes with a schedule.
- The cameras, one by one: what is visible from each today compared with what was visible on the day of handover. Field of view, focus, dirt on the dome, the hedge that grew, the sign somebody hung in front of it. It is the inspection that finds the most and the one most often skipped. And at the bad hour, not at midday: if the system works at night, at least one inspection a year is done at night.
- The drives and the recording: the state of each drive and a real check that the days that should be there are there — not the system saying so, but pulling a recording from the oldest day and watching it.
- The backup power: measuring the runtime with everything running and replacing batteries by age, not when they decide.
- The detectors and the readers, one at a time, checking that the control panel identifies them in the place they actually are and not the one on the label.
- The alert chain, end to end and with the phone in hand: that when it triggers it reaches whoever it should, and that whoever receives it still works here.
- The cabinet: temperature, dust, filters, space, and that the labelling still matches what is inside.
- And a written report of all of the above: what is fine, what has to be fixed now and what will have to be replaced next year. A visit with no report cannot be told apart from a visit that never happened.
What determines the response time.
The numbers in a support contract all look alike. What meets them or fails to meet them is this.
Whether there is remote access set up. With it, the useful response time is however long it takes to pick up the phone; without it, however long it takes to arrive, and arriving depends on the traffic.
Whether there is documentation and somebody who knows that installation. An engineer walking into a place with no drawings and no schematics starts by working out what is there, and that is counted in hours.
Whether the part is in stock. A four-hour response that ends in «we'll have to order it» is not a four-hour response: it is a four-hour visit and a two-week repair. That is why spares are decided at the design stage —which parts, how many and where— and not on the day something breaks.
And whether the engineer can get in. On many sites the engineer does not go in alone: an escort, an authorisation or a specific time slot is needed, and a bank branch does not open at four in the morning because an engineer asks. It is worth having thought about it beforehand and not finding out with the system down.
What gets handed over, and who gets shown.
A system only one person knows how to operate breaks the day that person goes on holiday. And one only the supplier who built it understands is a dependency, however good the supplier is.
So what exists gets handed over: as-built drawings, schematics of cabinets and lines, the equipment with model, serial number and location, the network addresses, the test certificates, the maintenance schedule and the administrator passwords in the client's name.
And the people who are there every day get shown how to use it, not the person who signs: what each alert means, what to do with a fault, how a recording is pulled out and handed over so it stands up, what must never be touched. In writing and written for whoever arrives in two years' time, because that is who will read it.
Training is the part of maintenance that saves the most calls, and the first to drop out of a tight quotation.
What we do not do.
We do not sell maintenance that is only a phone number. If what you want is to be able to call when something breaks and nothing more, that exists and it has its price — but it should not be called maintenance.
We do not invoice preventive visits that do not happen. It is the most common trick in the sector and we find it on many installations that come to us: a one-line annual report saying «installation inspected, correct», with a date and nothing else.
We do not sign up to times that depend on things we do not control without saying what they depend on. A response time put in writing without having first talked about access, spares and documentation is a number for the signature, not a commitment.
And we are still not the cheapest. Maintenance that is actually carried out has hours inside it, and hours show up in the price. Anyone comparing two contracts on the annual total will choose the other one, and they are right until the day they call at three in the morning.
How you check it yourself.
Six questions for the maintenance you already have under contract. The answers can be understood without knowing anything about this.
- Ring the support number tonight, at the bad hour. You do not need to invent a fault: knowing who picks up and what they can do already tells you almost everything.
- Ask for the last preventive maintenance report. If it does not exist, or if it fits on one line, it was not done.
- Ask when somebody last checked what can be seen from each camera. If the answer is the day of installation, there are fields of view that have been lost.
- Ask whether anybody would find out that a camera has stopped recording, and how. If the answer is that you would see it when you looked, nobody is watching the system.
- Ask what spares are held for your installation: the honest answer is a list, not «whatever is needed».
- And look at whose name the administrator passwords are in. If they are not in yours, the maintenance is not a service: it is a closed door.
The other seven areas.
The technical service is what decides whether the other seven are still useful in three years. That is why it is contracted with them and not afterwards.
What people ask about maintenance.
The ones that come up most. There are 22 on this subject, and the other 16 are in the question index.
All the questions, by subject▸What is a maintenance contract and what does it include?
It is an agreement with two distinct halves: the inspections carried out whether or not anything happens, which is the preventive part, and attention when something breaks, which is the corrective part. A serious contract says what gets inspected, how often, who picks up out of hours, how the system is accessed, what is included and what is invoiced separately.
What is worth looking at because it is often outside: materials and parts, extensions, out-of-hours call-outs, monitoring of the system and training for the people who use it. None of those five is a minor extra.
And maintenance that consists of coming when you call is corrective work under another name. It exists, it has its price and sometimes it is what is needed; what you should not do is call it maintenance and compare it with one that is.
What WestPoint's maintenance covers Installation and maintenance, in full
▸What is the difference between preventive and corrective maintenance?
The preventive part runs to a schedule and finds what has not failed yet: the field of view that was lost, the dirty lens, the drive starting to throw errors, the battery that no longer holds, the dusty detector, the alert going to the email of somebody who no longer works there. The corrective part is what is done once something has already broken.
Most of the expensive faults that reach us were things a properly done inspection would have seen months earlier. Not all: a lightning strike or a lorry turning a camera cannot be prevented. But most of the ones that leave somebody without a recording can.
And the preventive part is proven with a report. A visit with no report cannot be told apart from a visit that never happened, and that is exactly the most common trick in the sector.
Inspections and faults, how they divide up How an installation is maintained
▸How often does the installation need inspecting?
That is set by the type of installation and by the regulations that apply to it: fire detection and systems connected to an alarm receiving centre have their intervals laid down, and the rest is set by what is installed, by the use and by what the client cannot afford to lose.
As a working rule, at least one full inspection a year, spread over more visits when the installation is large or critical. And at least one of them at the bad hour: if the system works at night, inspecting it at midday is inspecting something else.
What really sets the frequency are the elements that degrade on their own and without warning: fields of view, lenses, batteries, cabinet filters and drives. In a dusty environment or one with vibration, all of that goes faster.
▸What happens if I call at three in the morning?
One of four things happens, and all four are written the same way in a quotation. A voicemail answers. A switchboard answers, takes a note of the call and passes it on in the morning. Somebody answers who can do nothing until an engineer arrives. Or somebody answers who gets into the system while they are talking to you.
For it to be the last one, three things are needed at once: somebody who picks up and knows what they are being told about, remote access set up and tested —with permission and with a log—, and a route for when that is not enough, which is who goes, from where and with which part in the boot. If one is missing, the other two are no use.
The way to check it on the maintenance you already have under contract is to ring the support number on any given night. You do not need to invent a fault: knowing who picks up and what they can do already tells you almost everything.
The 24 × 7 service, how it works The contact phone numbers and email
▸How does a fault get escalated?
By what has stopped working, not by how agitated the caller is. One camera down out of twenty is not the same as the whole recorder stopped, nor as a door that will not open with people inside, nor as a fire control panel in fault.
That order is written into the contract and the client decides it, because only they know what hurts: what counts as critical on their site, who deals with it first line, when it goes up to a specialist engineer or to the manufacturer, and who at their end has to be told at each level.
And there is a part that is not in our hands: whether the engineer can get in. Many sites require an escort, prior authorisation or a specific time slot, and a bank branch does not open in the small hours because an engineer asks. It is worth having sorted out beforehand and not finding out with the system down.
How a fault is classified and dealt with How incidents are managed in IRIS
▸What can be fixed without going out?
More than people expect. A service that has stopped, a setting somebody changed, a user who cannot log in, a recorder that has stopped talking to two cameras, an alert that stopped being sent because an email address changed, an update that has to be rolled back. All of that is resolved without anyone moving.
And there are things that cannot be fixed from a screen however much you would like: a broken drive, a burnt-out power supply, a cut cable, a camera turned by a lorry, a lens that has lost focus over the years, a dirty detector, a reader that has stopped reading.
The honest thing is to say on the first call which of the two it is, instead of keeping the client trying things on the phone for two hours only to go out anyway.
What support resolves remotely The state of the cameras, up to date
Get started
You call, and what happens?
Tell us what is installed, who maintains it today, what documentation exists and what was the last thing that broke. With that we will tell you what is missing and what is not needed. If what you have is well maintained, we will tell you that too and we will not sell you anything.