In The Trenches Video Series
Security Systems for Car Dealerships
Our panel of experts discuss car dealership security, surveillance systems, and remote video monitoring for auto dealerships
Our speakers today are:
- > Matthew Nederlanden (CEO)
- > Micah Shearer (COO)
- > Benjamin LaRue (Director of Sales)
- > James Campbell (Product Specialist)
Video Transcription
Ben Larue:
In my opinion, the better entrance to get LPC from, you're going to have a more direct head on shot from a camera mounted on the building, with license plate capture, angle of vehicle and speed of vehicle are two of the biggest factors you have to consider.
James Campbell:
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of In the Trenches Roundtable. This one is going to be a industry focus, we're talking about an industry we deal with quite frequently and that is car dealerships. Got an awesome panel, as usual, here to discuss things. I've got Ben Larue, our sales director.
Ben Larue:
Hey everyone.
James Campbell:
I've got our CO, Micah Shearer.
Micah Shearer:
Hello.
James Campbell:
And finally, I've got our, I was not supposed to say last but not least, Gill. I've got our CEO, Matthew Nederlanden.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Hi everybody.
James Campbell:
All right. So like we said, lots of moving parts with a car dealership. You get a lot of people potentially on the lot, customers, you've got high ticket items. What are some of the first concerns you hear from the car dealership when they're looking to get security involved in their facility?
Micah Shearer:
I feel like, Ben, that's a great question for you.
Ben Larue:
Sure, sure. Yeah, I wasn't sure if someone else is going to take it first, but I'll take a stab. Typically, the first thing we hear from car dealerships, I would say they kind of get grouped into two categories when they first call in. It's the category of something just happened, an incident with a customer, something with an employee maybe, maybe a vehicle was stolen or damaged, something happened and now they are realizing the gaps or flaws they had in their surveillance or security systems. Or you have the other bucket of people, other bucket of clients that are being proactive, they've maybe heard of something in the industry that's happened, maybe they have a fellow dealership down the road where something had taken place and they are trying to be a little bit more proactive. I would say those are the two main people that would call in for auto dealerships.
From there, I think it's really determining whether or not we're talking about using a video or access control system for security purposes or for a data intelligence purpose. So the car dealership, it's very popular right now. And I'd say those are probably the places we like to start the most when we get calls in from car dealerships.
James Campbell:
Can you tell me or anybody tell me a little bit about, let's start with the security end of it, what are some of the major, what should somebody be concerned about if they have a car dealership, that these products can solve or help with?
Matthew Nederlanden:
Well, I'll get started there. I think one of the things that's really sort of unique about a car dealership is that you don't have a lot of industries that are specifically targeted by thieves, and this is definitely one of them. If you wanted to steal a vehicle, a car dealership is usually your first thought of where would I go to do that? And so additionally, you have outdoor assets. Those are always challenging to secure.
Micah Shearer:
And I would say there's this additional complexity with dealerships, that you have so much traffic, you have so many people going on and off that you want there. You want it to be an open and inviting sort of environment from a business perspective. But then you also want to be able to identify when someone shouldn't be there. And that I think is particularly challenging. Can I jump in about the concept of dealerships being targeted? I find that most of the conversations I'm having on that topic are not sort of the smash and grab, somebody comes and steals a vehicle in the middle of the night. A lot more frequently it's fraud. It's somebody coming into the dealership presenting themselves as somebody that they're not, maybe they're financing something somehow and then they're walking out with a vehicle and then a couple days later somebody connects the dots and they realize it's fraud and they're trying to go back through the footage to look and identify who was there when. So that brings up this extra dynamic of wanting really good tight coverage of all of your sales floors and all of your sales areas.
Ben Larue:
And definitely from, to piggyback off that and circle back to what Matt was originally talking about with asset security, with dealerships specifically without all the outdoor typically unprotected from a physical standpoint, there's not many fences usually around auto dealerships. As Micah was alluding, they want them to be welcoming to welcome the public on during business hours, things like catalytic converters. It might not be the physical vehicle that's being stolen, but just the hacking of the catalytic converter. That's a big thing right now in the car industry.
Micah Shearer:
Maybe it would make sense to sort of bucket the conversation real fast into outdoor and indoor because you have sort of different challenges and different strategies that you're going to use in both of those environments. So when we're talking about the exterior, we're talking about guarding against catalytic converter theft and theft of the big physical objects.
Ben Larue:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a great point because that's normally where the conversation's usually start with auto dealerships is hey I have all these physical assets outside, what can I do to better secure them? And on that notion things we would recommend first and foremost when and if possible, fencing or any other type of actual physical security that would break people from being able to just walk on property anywhere. Of course fencing per foot can get extremely expensive. So you can look to alternative things like maybe a video surveillance system with some active deterrents on it potentially you could also-
Micah Shearer:
Can you elaborate on what you mean by active deterrents?
Ben Larue:
Yeah, yeah, of course. So in one of the other videos we talked about some of the advanced analytics, some of the cameras that we have. Those would include things like intrusion detection and human detection in some scenarios on some of-
Micah Shearer:
So you can draw a line and say if something crosses this line, it's considered having in intruded into our property.
Ben Larue:
That's exactly right. And you can set certain thresholds and certain times that this turns on and off, but on certain cameras that have active deterrents, things like white lights could flash or just turn on. You could also get-
Micah Shearer:
I swear every time I walk in that building and that lookout like yells at me makes me jump.
Ben Larue:
Welcome. Right? Absolutely.
Micah Shearer:
I don't think he has it saying welcome right now. I think you have some very threatening message going on.
Speaker 5:
You're in the alert area, please leave.
James Campbell:
Yeah, I think support changed it to something about deep water being there.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Yeah, it says dangerous water at the moment.
James Campbell:
It used to say welcome. I put it as welcome.
Ben Larue:
So there we go. There are one of the 10 different pre-recorded messages you could have sound, right? So if you had deep water on your dealership somewhere you could have the camera sound that if it detected somebody coming in that intrusion area, right. That's awesome. But from a very practical sense, active deterrents do make a difference. They can help alleviate some of the, hopefully actually deter some of that crime that's going to take place. It's probably not the most secure way to accomplish perimeter security at a dealership. There is actually a whole industry that focuses on that.
Micah Shearer:
Well that's sort of the challenge of all security measures as well. There are these very, very advanced perimeter detection systems that are out there, but they're every bit as expensive as a fence. Frequently they involve installing a fence and then adding on detection along the fence line. So while cameras, nothing is a complete solution to some extent and cameras are not going to always prevent somebody from coming on the property. They also can be a really good bang for your buck, so to speak. Compared to fencing in the entire sort of outlying perimeter of your facility.
Ben Larue:
That's right, yeah, definitely. For the most cost effective measure to get security on the outside of your facility, you're not going to [inaudible 00:08:16]
Micah Shearer:
Cameras can go a long way. Yeah.
Ben Larue:
Exactly.
Micah Shearer:
The other thing we run into with dealerships is also the, often the expanse, they have these giant parking lots. So you have your building but then you've got this really big parking lot and how do you cover the very far corner of that parking lot that's 500 a thousand, 2000 feet from your building. That's where we end up using sometimes using a wireless back haul. If you've got power on a power pole out there, we can do a wireless setup that gets a camera, extends that camera all the way out and extends your perimeter so to speak.
Matthew Nederlanden:
I think that's a good point to bring up that even within a car dealership you can have a huge amount of variety. The complexities if you have one building versus multiple on your car dealership, the complexity of how large is your parking lot, the complexity of do I have a service area, is going to change your threats rather significantly. It is a very large collection of types of businesses
Micah Shearer:
And which brings up all these different stakeholders. Your sales director, your sales team has one set of interests. Your HR director often has another set of interests. Your services manager has a very different set of interests. So often we find these conversations get pretty complex on the front end to really identify where the priorities are. When you go back to that you know can spend 80% more and get 10% more coverage. So you end up having to make very careful decisions about where your priorities are.
James Campbell:
Can we talk about a little bit about that data side of it? You mentioned being able to see, I know that that's a big concern from a lot of car dealerships, just simply being able to see what's going on outside. So when a customer rolls up, a salesperson can be out there ready to shake their hand and welcome them. Can you talk a little bit more about the benefits that you might get from something like video surveillance with that?
Ben Larue:
Definitely, yeah. As Micah alluded to earlier, one of the biggest causes for dealerships to increase their coverage for surveillance systems would be because of fraud that's taking place. And so having interior cameras in the lobby with higher end features like W D R to adjust to different lightings is super helpful there to combat some of that. But from a strictly intelligent data standpoint, cameras in lobbies and waiting areas or in service departments to be able to see the comings and goings of people, how long people are there for, how responsive is their team being a customer might make a complaint about them not getting service in a certain period of time. We can use the video footage to be able to fact check that or not.
And then with the dealerships I've been working with most recently, false claims from the service department is actually probably one of the biggest use cases we see from that data standpoint. So a lot of fraud is taking place with people saying, Hey, you scratched my vehicle when you're working on it. That dent or that scratch wasn't there before. And that is typically a pretty lengthy process to go fact check and validify without a high end surveillance system in place with cameras in the right places, capturing the right things.
Micah Shearer:
And talking about cameras in the right places. I mean this is a conversation we've been having on the installation side lately and really choosing those locations to establish condition of vehicle as it enters the property. I don't know how much that's happening earlier in the conversation for you Ben, but we're finding a lot of like, okay, we're basically finding a choke point. Do you have a service bay that every vehicle has to drive through? And that's where we're going to concentrate our coverage to maximize the ability to establish this was the condition of the vehicle when it entered our property. See that scratch right there? That predated our team interacting with it. We find that we have a lot of those kinds of conversations.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Let's take these one by one. Let's start off with the service area. What do we need to do to have the right camera in the right place for a service area? Well, one of the biggest needs about a service area is when you put a camera on a lift or put a vehicle on a lift, you typically, you're going to put cameras in the corners of your mechanic shop area, your service area, and when you put a vehicle on a lift, it can often obscure the viewpoint to the next vehicle. So you have this idea of like, all right, did we scratch this vehicle but the other vehicle was in the way? So you have to make sure that your mounting positions for the camera can continue to see the vehicle as it enters the facility from the left, from the right, et cetera, to make sure that, note that it came in the same condition that it left.
But a lot of times the places where you want to be able to observe as it's being worked on, which is equally important. You don't want anybody to come in and steal all your tools for example. You've got to watch that area, but you can often get a angle of view that is hard to see what you want to be able to see. And so typically you want to make sure that you have cameras on the inside to watch all your tools and all your assets so that you don't operationally stop functioning. But you also want to make sure you have cameras watching both sides of the entryway point of for the vehicle so that you can confirm that the vehicle was in good condition when you brought it in. Next up, let's talk about a sales floor. What do we need for the right product in the right place in a sales floor? What are our challenges there?
Ben Larue:
I think for the sales floor, some of the biggest challenges is going to be again, just like the service department, the layout of the actual floor. Do we have higher end models being showcased inside the sales floor? Is that going to obstruct or deter,or get in the way of some of the views? What do some of the architectural designs look like? Many dealerships nowadays, especially ones that are branded from a manufacturer, are having these glass walls or complete glass entry areas. And I mentioned W D R earlier, that is a setting, a feature. Our cameras have to adjust to lighting.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Wide dynamic range for anybody that is not.
Ben Larue:
Thank you.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Used to industry speak. And wide dynamic range, what it does is, it allows it to take one video from two different sets of exposure on the camera. So exposure where you can see what's in the shadows and an exposure setting on the imagery where you can see what's really well lit and it allows it to record the best view from each of those into one video file. So what this means is basically you can see just as well in the shadowy areas as in the bright areas, and this is really important for something like what Ben is talking about with big giant glass windows where you can have a really challenging lighting situation because of what you want the building to look like in terms of being MOUs and impressive all the things the dealership wants that can actually make recording video kind of difficult.
Ben Larue:
Definitely. But to backtrack for a second here James, and just kind of I think, recap, summarize some of the stuff we're talking about here from a data standpoint, how we can leverage a surveillance system. The first place we want to look at at a dealership is the service department. That is where a dealership makes a majority of their revenue is actually from the service department, the dealership itself. And so the inefficiencies that happen from a service department can make or break a year in terms of your revenue books. What I mean by that, the operational efficiencies inside of the service department are things like are vehicles getting damaged? Are there a lot of claims against our employees? Are our employees actually working when they're supposed to be? All of these things can greatly impact the amount of revenue you're able to get out of your service department.
James Campbell:
One question I know we have quite a bit with car dealerships is audio capabilities. What can you guys tell me about that?
Ben Larue:
Yeah, definitely. I think audio capabilities for interior cameras on dealerships make a lot of sense. Now I want to be abundantly clear, nobody on this call and nobody at SCW is a lawyer so we cannot give legal advice by any means. So you'll certainly want to advise with a lawyer in your state prior to purchasing and recording audio. But from a physical security and from a surveillance standpoint, I highly recommend the use of audio on interior spaces of a dealership, primarily that sales floor and service department lobby.
James Campbell:
What benefits might you get from, we talked about fraud being a major concern for dealerships. What would audio potentially help there? How would it help I should say?
Ben Larue:
Well definitely I was just going to mention some of the benefits you would see from audio recording. Fraud, I'll cover in just a minute. Actually the biggest thing I've seen from working with dealership clients and audio specifically is fact checking customer and employee transactions. And primarily being the service department. Services being offered or not being offered and that being verified or not being verified on the client end or the client claiming this, Hey this person offered me this service when I didn't need it or vice versa. A lot of those situations have been the primary purpose behind audio, but of course for fraud, someone claiming them to be someone that they're not and having the video and audio recording of that taking place. Extremely helpful in your case there.
James Campbell:
So I kind of feel like we covered a decent bit about the inside of a dealership. We kind of covered this a little bit in the beginning, but I'd love to talk a little bit more about the larger dealership, the larger exteriors. I've got this example here. You guys see that of this big car dealership that has massive service bays. One of the biggest ones I think actually in the country if I recall right. How do you deal with long parking lots where you still want to maintain coverage on those far corners of the parking lot while, what are the different ways of tackling that, I guess?
Micah Shearer:
And it kind of comes down to you have to choose between two strategies. One is a camera with longer range and two is getting a camera out to the far end of the parking lot. As far as getting a camera out to the far end of the parking lot, typically from an installation perspective, I'm looking for something like a light pole with electricity that I can tap into because if I've got that then I can set up a ubiquity wireless or maybe not ubiquity, but any sort of wireless back haul to get that signal back over to the main system. As far as longer range cameras, Ben probably can speak to how he purchased that best.
Ben Larue:
Definitely. But I think first, just to piggyback off what Mike has said and to reiterate that's where we need to start. We need to start by looking at a facility like this and say, okay, what infrastructure do we have in place? Do we have light poles in the parking lot maybe to those light poles there's already underground conduit, I'm not sure, let's find out together. That way we can determine whether we have the ability to easily put cameras on those poles or do we need to leverage the building with long-range cameras. Once those infrastructure discussions are had, then we can determine, yes, okay, we do need to place cameras on these poles. We can power them and get data a variety of different ways, but now we know we have the ability to do that. Or leveraging the building. Let's look at long range cameras. Frankly, on parking lots with this much sweeping area to cover, PTZs or cameras that can pan, tilt and zoom usually give you the most coverage for your dollar in terms of long range.
There's different patrols and presets that you can customize on these cameras, these types of cameras. There's a whole video that goes into depth into all that. But just know traditionally we like to start from the building out in these type of setups. First understanding your infrastructure and then we can start diving into the specific camera types and such.
Matthew Nederlanden:
But it's important to note that when we're talking about long range cameras, we have cameras that can go as far as identifying a person at almost two miles away. We have some really long range cameras, something like 500 feet, like what James is talking about in this example. It's certainly doable. But it's doable under a condition. And that is you get a longer range but take the angle of view and you narrow it down. And so what happens there is as the angle of you of what the camera is recording gets narrower, those same pixels are in a smaller area so your pixel per foot increases but you're not getting the sort of wide angle view that allows you to see every single access point. And that's one of the main challenges with the dealership is that yes, you have these places where people typically go, they typically drive down the road, they typically walk in the sidewalk, et cetera.
There are some pace places that people, the vast majority of times they go and you want to have very good views of those places. But you also have risks that can come from any direction. Somebody can jump the fence at any point in the fence if you have a fence. And a lot of dealerships don't even have a fence. So wide angle views, if we can do that jumping onto a light pole or something like that, just like Micah said, those are going to be preferable because then we're able to really see everything that's going on in your property. And additionally you can mirror and do part of what Ben is saying and part of what Mica's saying by having a long range ptz and having some cameras that have that line crossing intrusion detection that then tell that ptz to zoom in there. So you see somebody-
Micah Shearer:
Yeah, that's a newer feature. That's pretty cool.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Yeah, it's amazing. It's so great. Really cool.
Micah Shearer:
Cause we used to always super tell people if you're going to do it, avoid ptz's. Cause odds are it's pointing in the wrong direction from when something actually happens. But this newer feature where you can literally make a fixed lens camera speak to a P T Z and apply that sort of pan tilt zoom much more intelligently is kind of a game changer.
James Campbell:
Okay, well tell me about license plates. How do we, let's talk about them.
Micah Shearer:
Sure. I mean they're particularly challenging from an installation perspective because-
Ben Larue:
Before we even talk about that, I would like to talk about the two distinct terms that are used in this industry.
Micah Shearer:
Oh, yes please.
Ben Larue:
Because we need to make sure we're clear about what term we're talking about here. There are two different terms. The most common term and that everybody has probably heard before is called L P R or license plate recognition. Let me remind you that license plate recognition, that is the physical recognizing of a license plate, logging and tracking that data somewhere.
Micah Shearer:
So there's a database, there's something you can look at and say, oh here they've translated the image they've used some sort of OCR software to translate the image into actual numbers in a database that can be searched.
Ben Larue:
Exactly, that you can go pull that from at a later time. That is license plate recognition. That is extremely different from L P C, which is license plate capture, which is simply the ability of a high-end camera to be able to capture a license plate at a higher rate at a higher success rate.
Matthew Nederlanden:
A camera with L P R has L P C. A camera with L P C does not necessarily have L P R. That will be on the S A T.
Ben Larue:
Boom.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Wait, did we do SATs anymore?
Ben Larue:
Yeah, but while now that we have those two terms defined that are most commonly talked about in this industry, what we're going to be discussing here in this conversation in terms of placement to help capture license plates, we're going to be talking about LPC license plate capture, some of the camera models that we would recommend and where we would place them. And so now that we understand that from an installation standpoint, Micah you were saying?
Micah Shearer:
Well I mean the considerations for the installation standpoint are going to be the same whether you're talking about L P R or L P C because before you can recognize and database a license plate, you've got to be able to properly capture that image. License plates are particularly challenging cause you have a highly reflective surface, it's small. So when you turn on the infrared often you get this bounce back. So you've got to make sure that there's enough light essentially that the camera can get enough natural light, not just through infrared light, to be able to visually read that license plate. And that all comes down to location and positions. So we're usually looking for something that slows a car down in a location that has enough light. Now we've got these low light cameras so it really doesn't need that much light, but just a little bit of background light is going to help you out. So typically-
Ben Larue:
And in most cases with lighting especially at night and these high powered high zoom cameras that we'll be using, we can zoom the camera in and the license plate light actually itself.
Micah Shearer:
Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, there's usually enough there. So it really comes down to the physicality of the location. Just getting that camera at the right angle in the right place with the car slowed down a little bit. So we look for entrances, big 90 degree turns, if you can throw a speed bump in there, things like that. We are often putting those license plate cameras on light poles in these dealerships because that's usually what's out there by the entrance. And the sort of P T Z fix lens scenario we were talking about earlier, you often pair it with a scene camera. So you'll get a wide angle camera that gets the whole car as it's entering or exiting. And then you've got your camera dedicated just to the license plate. So everything can be calibrated specifically for capturing that image.
Ben Larue:
So yeah, so for license plate capture on this facility that you're looking at, there's two entrances clearly stated here on the west side and then the southeast side of the facility. Those are ideal choke points as we referred to them earlier, right? Vehicles have to turn into these entrances or at the very least slow to enter these entrances here. That's ideal for license plate capture. The entrance on the west side is in my opinion, the better entrance to get LPC from. You're going to have a more direct head-on shot from a camera monitor on the building with license plate capture, angle of vehicle and speed of vehicle are two of the biggest factors you have to consider.
James Campbell:
So two things that I'm pulling out of this and from my experience as well is license plates are small in a scene. They are one foot by I think five inches,
Micah Shearer:
Six inches, something like that.
James Campbell:
Yeah, something like that. So they're very small in all practicalities. So you number as we're mentioning here, and this is something where having a professional installation team matters a lot because these are a lot of factors is that getting license plate becomes a system in itself that you have to work through and understand and carefully plan. You can't just generally put a bunch of cameras. You can have all the general coverage in the world, but you may not capture license plates with that reliably enough for it to be a system. So when you're looking, you know, need a camera that can zoom in so that way you're capturing as much of that one foot wide license plate as you can.
So all those details are as clear as possible every time you go through it. And I think as Micah mentioned, you know, need a camera that's covering that wider area because a license plate camera is just a license plate camera, it's not your license plate camera and your entrance camera. You got a picking one and another camera has to choose that. It has to be your coverage camera. And I think Ben, you made a great point about the entrances. The other factor is does your state have front license plates or only back license plate?
Ben Larue:
Exactly.
James Campbell:
Huge factor in deciding and that's something that-
Micah Shearer:
It's only a back license plate state we often end up having to have two license plate cameras. One to capture in and one to capture out.
James Campbell:
And you might be-
Matthew Nederlanden:
Let's also be honest that there's so much interstate travel these days that even if you are in a state that has two, you may be dealing with a customer who's traveled to you to exchange a vehicle that is coming from a state that only has one.
James Campbell:
And even in this example that we're talking about here, where that west entrance is perfect for, every state has back license plates at least. So you generally want to design it with that. There's less of a risk with the headlights and.
Ben Larue:
Exactly.
James Campbell:
And everything, you know. You could put that camera there on that building and potentially get good plates coming in and leaving there. But then you have this right side of the building where they have another entrance actually and they could potentially go through if there's spaces in between the parking. So it's never completely foolproof when you're dealing with a facility as open as a car dealership generally. And it becomes like, okay, where do I want to place all these cameras? Because it does add up kind of quickly when you're talking about multiple license plate cameras there. And just making sure that again, work with somebody who knows this stuff, who understands the, okay, you're in Florida, I know what kind of license plate situation you have set up there and understanding how to build that system for it.
Matthew Nederlanden:
I think this is a really good moment to throw a little pitch out here of a lot of times we started out as a brand, as a company that helped DIYers. And if you have, let's say an office building with a drop ceiling, yeah DIY is probably something you can definitely do. But a dealership probably you shouldn't be DIYing this. You need to have an expert in here, you need to work with our surveillance consultants to design a solution and you need to have a professional install it. There's so much complexity with the dealership with running the cameras across multiple buildings, of dealing with is there a trench between these two? How do I get the camera back and forth from the light post? This is really the profile that needs something like our national installation services and to have us project manage it. This really is a lot more complex than a four-person office or something.
Ben Larue:
Absolutely. And just to piggyback off that Matt, the complexity of these type of dealership, the example that we're looking at, this is an example of a larger facility. It's probably a manufacturer branded, it's probably a Ford or a Honda or et cetera. These type of dealerships you should be considering and talking to experts before you go budget because they're going to be far more complexities that you'll need to adjust for during the design phase than you'd be able to after the fact if you've already, let's say established a budget, right? Yes absolutely. We can design and build a system that adheres to your budget to the best of its ability. But the best execution of physical security on a dealership that I've been a part of has been designing a system, acquiring budget implementation.
James Campbell:
That starts of course, even in the building phase, if you're building a brand new facility, security should be a huge factor when you're building it because that's the easiest time to place that conduit to go to your light pole or with the wiring to go to light pole so you can have data there and all that kind of stuff. Anything else that you guys can think of when it comes to video surveillance that we maybe didn't cover?
Ben Larue:
I think for me the biggest thing on video surveillance, especially on these bigger facilities, facilities that might have multiple buildings like a separate sales office from the service department, IP security equipment, IP surveillance, and IP access control in many cases use, can use, infrastructure that may already be in place. Now we don't always want to use it and we might not be able to, but it's just something to consider. IP surveillance, we typically use CAT five V or cat six cable, let's look into what you might already have in place.
Micah Shearer:
Especially as time goes on, it is gets more likely. And it used to be everything existing that we ran into was probably coax and at that point it's pretty much useless to us. But over time we are finding more and more stuff that is prewired with some cat five cables and depending on where those cameras are placed, that can be reused. If you've got multiple buildings and if you've got fiber in between the buildings we're, it's probably going to be in your interest to find a way to tap into that fiber, you'll just get a much faster, more efficient network that way as well.
Ben Larue:
Definitely. And then really my final thought on auto dealerships is from all the experience I've had working with owners, general managers, service directors, loss preventions people, a camera is not always a camera. And what I mean by that is not every camera is created equal. So just because you have a camera in place now does not mean you are actually covered, especially if we're talking about an outdated system. It's time to start considering what it would look like or cost to upgrade to something that actually will do what you need it to when the time comes.
Micah Shearer:
What main things are you seeing in sort of outdated systems? How do you define an outdated system then?
Ben Larue:
Definitely the first is going to be cabling or the type of system it actually is. So is it an analog based system? Does it use the older style of cabling?
Micah Shearer:
And if it's analog, that's going to have drawbacks because your resolution is so low.
Ben Larue:
I mean that's the big thing I'm getting at here is resolution. Biggest thing with dealerships is being able to clearly identify or recognize the face of the person that's doing the crime and then being able to use that evidence. Most analog systems very hard to use the evidence in court.
Micah Shearer:
Can't tell if it's your uncle or your grandma. Yeah, it's just-
Matthew Nederlanden:
Or even just take the use case of trying to figure out is that car scratched before it got in here? An analog system is going to be such low quality, you're not going to be able to answer that. Is that scratch there or not? The whole thing is just hard to see. So almost anything we're talking about extracting value from video, what is happening in this video? You can't do if the video is really low quality.
James Campbell:
If you're consistently being like, oh man, if the camera's just that much clearer, I would've been able to see who that was. It's probably time for an upgrade.
Micah Shearer:
It's probably time.
Matthew Nederlanden:
It can be clearer.it can be a lot clearer.
Ben Larue:
If it looks like you're looking through underwater lens, it's probably time to upgrade.
James Campbell:
So let's talk about access control now. Access control, to give you a brief nutshell of what it is, it is a system of electronic locks that can limit who can access your doors, when they can access them and lots of stuff in between. It logs it. So lots of benefits from that. Let's talk about that with the dealership because dealerships have these big wide open kind of spaces. Not usually the first thing I think of is access control for them because you do have this wide open space, you want people to come in, it's supposed to be easy to get into for business hours. Can you guys talk to me about maybe what the benefits of access control could be?
Micah Shearer:
Well you don't want people to get in everywhere. So I mean I was touring a dealership at one point and I just walked into their server room and it was just wide open. We talked about putting a camera to see who got back there, but there wasn't any real mechanism for controlling access. You've also got finance departments, you've got really clear front of house, back of house areas and you probably also have fairly high turnover. So access control can be really, really helpful for managing who has access to what parts of the building.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Let's not leave out, you've also got your highest dollar inventory inside the showroom in most cases. You got some really nice cars inside that sort of big glass den area. You want to make sure you protect those assets.
Ben Larue:
Definitely. And to Micah's point earlier, there's a lot of downtime between that front of house and back of house interactions. If you've ever bought a new vehicle or a used vehicle from a dealership, you've spent the several hours at a dealership and there's multiple times throughout that transaction where you're not accompanied by an employee of the dealership where you end up going throughout that dealership. This is what access control can help with the most I think. And then the second thing that I've experienced the most working with clients is restricting access within the company to certain areas of the facility. So a very common operational inefficiency for dealerships is salespeople spending too much time in the service department or vice versa service department spending too much time in the sales floor.
And so simply being able to restrict or grant access to certain employees in given areas. So if you don't want your sales people, your regular sales associates in the service department, maybe you don't give them access to access those buildings. Something simple that could go a really long way in making sure people are where they're supposed to be at the times they're supposed to be there.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Or even going back-
Micah Shearer:
I definitely had, oh sorry. I definitely had conversations with folks about, oh that door, literally I'm touring the facility and they're saying, oh well that door is supposed to stay locked so I don't really need another camera on it, but really half the time it's not locked. So we're having these sort of human behavior versus reality kind of conversations or versus the ideal conversations. And if you put access control on that, our open pass system, then you don't have to have conversations about whether or not that door stays locked.
James Campbell:
Yeah, that's a service department seem like the best role there for access control because you know, you don't want customers going in and, Hey, how's my car doing? Let me check. Can I watch you while you do it? They know-
Micah Shearer:
That's a major liability issue.
Matthew Nederlanden:
That's a giant liability risk.
James Campbell:
And if you don't keep that door locked, which is hard to do because people need to come in, come out and grab something from the back and grab a part, grab the oil filter if they don't have it in there and they have to do all this stuff consistently. And if that door isn't locking behind them and creating a secure, making so that they can leave easily, but not everyone can just walk into it, then it's a big huge liability like everyone's saying. And that does happen. Now access to goal is definitely something to consider. And from all those facets from different finance locations where you store your keys are just another place. I think I've seen every dealership's different systems from that. Some are as simple as a lockbox and out in the front.
Micah Shearer:
Sometimes the keys are right behind the desk in the sales room and somebody walks up and reaches over and grabs them.
James Campbell:
Yeah. So yeah. Anything else from access control?
Matthew Nederlanden:
Let's just talk about what is access control real quick. What is the experience like with access control if you get open path access control from us? So what's going to happen is you're going to have a little app on your phone and you're not going to have to get your phone out in order to do this. You can just sit in your pocket, you just wave in front of the reader and this will open the door if you have the proper credentials. So are you allowed to access this part of the building and is it the hours that you're allowed to access it? So maybe you say your salespeople can come and go from the sales floor between the hours that we're open, 8:00 AM till 9:00 PM but they can't get into the server room and they can't get into the service area. Maybe your IT crowd can get into the server room but they can't get into the service area, et cetera.
So you can grant access based upon sort of role personality and allow people to come and go. And you can set up the access to allow you to come and go during certain time periods, but maybe not other time periods. Somebody's showing up at three in the morning and you've got a building with keys, they're getting in, they're probably not doing anything that they're supposed to be doing at three. Let's also talk about, I put in access control here on this building that we're in before we started selling it. And I would like to talk for a second about why did we want to do that? Why did we care so much about it? Well right now in the US turnover for a sales position is about nine months. It's lower for a dealership. Dealership is a higher turnover rate than average. And on average your salesman is going to last less than nine months.
That's a really big problem for re-keying. So if you've got a traditional key base system, it's going to be somewhere between 500 and $1,500 per door every time you have somebody leave. That's a huge amount of money, a massive expense. It's a really easy argument of just stop doing that expense and get something that is cloud-based where you can turn somebody's access on or off based on are they still employed here, et cetera. And it saves you so much money over the long term. It's astronomical because that re keying cost is so high. So high.
Ben Larue:
Exactly. Yeah, that's what a big use case have access control on these open air open area facilities, the trackings and comings and goings of people. Every time they scan in you know that it's that user that's scanned in that door at this time. That goes a long way in being able to tell what was actually happening in a given situation if something were to come up. The only thing I do want to mention is if you're considering access control or if you're thinking, oh man, access control sounds great, but that must cost an arm and a leg to retrofit after the fact. It certainly can. But as Matt alluded to the total cost of ownership over time, you're going to see way more benefit from an access control system just purely cost wise over its lifetime versus traditional lock and key set.
So although the upfront cost to get new locking mechanisms to get the physical infrastructure in place may seem astronomical, you're going to be spending 10 times that amount over the next 10, 12 years re-keying every time someone, an employee leaves, the turnover happens. So there's that thought. And then the only other thought I have is if you're remodeling or building new and you're purchasing doors, you can purchase the electrified hardware from the door manufacturing company directly. So you can purchase the hardest part, the most expensive part of an access control system when you buy the door.
Micah Shearer:
Yeah, I mean at least half your cost is typically cutting that electrified AC locking hardware into your doors, which can be expensive in a retrofit situation. So if you can do it upfront when you're buying the doors, that is definitely a more efficient use of your money.
Ben Larue:
Definitely.
James Campbell:
I think that sums up what we talked about earlier. Plan, if you're doing a build new build plan your building with security in mind because it'll save you a lot of money.
Micah Shearer:
And I mean, if I can just throw a plug for just planning in general, understanding that if you're dealing with a retrofit or if you're dealing with a new build, you really are going to set yourself up for success if you come prepared to have a lot of really good, really meaty conversations before anybody sets foot in the building. Identifying things like what are my main needs? Who are my stakeholders? How are they using the system? And being able to have those conversations before we even start walking around a property is the ideal use of time.
I mean by the time we get to a site survey, all of that should be nailed down so that all a site survey is really doing is looking at what does my ceiling look like? Are there any obstacles I didn't anticipate when mapping all of this out? Not having conversations about does my HR director need access and are they doing it from a phone or from their computer? All of that stuff should be discussed and unpacked as early in the process as possible because it will affect everything from what cables you need to run, to how your network is structured to whether or not you need to buy dedicated computers. Because somebody wants to run 128 simultaneous feeds on some sort of video wall.
James Campbell:
And nobody knows your needs, nobody knows your unique requirements for your system more than you as a customer. You've got to be able to have that time to give your concerns, give your needs to your security provider, and then their job is to turn that into recommending the right products, the right placements and everything with that.
Micah Shearer:
And if I can make a plug for Ben's team, that's the kind of stuff they love. They love digging into this. They want to have those conversations and they're really good at having them. So if you'll give his team some time in advance to really dig into the system requirements and the design, you're going to set yourself up for a much better experience over the course of the project.
James Campbell:
Oh, think that puts a pretty good button on it. This was car dealerships. I want to thank our awesome panel here for joining us again and thank you for watching. If you do have any questions, any concerns, want to learn more, please reach out to us number and everything like that is up here and we'll have more info in the links in the description below. And thank you. We'll see you next time.