Found at 8am
You already have checkpoint scanning on your sites. The data is good. The problem is when anyone looks at it. The night supervisor reviews patrol reports in the morning, and on Wednesday she sees that the guard at the builders' merchant did no rounds between 1am and 4am. The guard says he felt unwell and sat in the cabin. Nobody knew, including the control room, which spoke to him on a welfare call at 2am and heard nothing wrong.
Nothing happened that night. But if something had, the site would have gone unpatrolled for three hours and your company would have found out after the client.
Why patrol data sits unread
Patrol systems are often set up to record, not to alert. Reports are produced after the fact, and the control room works from a separate screen of welfare calls and alarms. Nobody is watching the patrol schedule in real time, because watching dozens of sites by eye is not realistic.
There is also a gap between the systems themselves. The welfare call log, the alarm monitoring screen and the patrol system were bought at different times, often from different suppliers, and none of them knows about the others. A controller can speak to a guard at 2am, tick the welfare call as fine, and have no idea that the same guard has not scanned a checkpoint for an hour. The information needed to spot the problem exists; it is just on three screens that nobody looks at together.
- Patrol schedules are in the patrol system, not in front of the controller.
- A late patrol looks the same as a slow one until it is very late.
- Skipped checkpoints within a completed round are easy to miss.
- Follow-up calls are logged separately, if at all.
- Morning reviews take time and happen after the risk has passed.
The cost of finding out late
Unpatrolled hours are exactly when things happen on vacant or quiet sites. A client who learns about a missed patrol before you do has good reason to doubt the contract. A guard who is unwell and not patrolling may be a welfare issue as much as a performance one. And the morning review is itself time consuming, repeated for every site every day.
Live patrol alerts for the control room
- Each site's patrol schedule is loaded: rounds due, checkpoints in each round and how late a round can be before it counts as missed, set by you.
- Checkpoint scans are read as they happen from your patrol app or the one we build.
- When a round is overdue, the control room gets an alert on its screen with the site, guard, last scan and contact number.
- Skipped checkpoints within a round raise a lower-priority alert.
- The controller follows your procedure: call the guard, and escalate to a supervisor or mobile unit if the guard does not respond. Each action is recorded against the alert with time and notes.
- The guard's reason is recorded, whether illness, an incident, a blocked route or something else, so patterns show over time.
- The morning summary lists only the exceptions and how each was handled, rather than every patrol.
| Alert | Typical controller action | Recorded |
|---|---|---|
| Round overdue | Call the guard | Time, reason given |
| No response from guard | Escalate under your procedure | Who was contacted, when |
| Checkpoint skipped | Ask the guard to revisit | Revisit scan |
| Repeated misses at one site | Supervisor review | Notes and outcome |
The same night, with alerts
At 1.25am the round due at 1am at the builders' merchant has not started. The controller's screen shows the alert. She calls the guard, who says he feels unwell. She records it and follows your procedure, which in this case is a supervisor call and a check on whether relief is needed. The site is covered or the client is informed, as your contract requires. In the morning the supervisor sees one exception, already handled, instead of reading every report.
This joins up with welfare checks, so a guard who misses a patrol and a welfare call is treated as an urgent case, not two separate issues.
Signs your patrols need live alerts
- Missed patrols are found in the morning review.
- The control room cannot see patrol schedules.
- Skipped checkpoints go unnoticed.
- Follow-up calls are not recorded with the patrol.
- Clients sometimes spot missed patrols before you do.