Fire alarm maintnenance contracts

[Guest]

I’m presently looking at the practicalities and problems associated with renewing the maintenance contract for a large fire alarm system.  

As you are probably aware most organisations award such contracts through the process of competitive tendering. But how competitive can such a process be if the fire alarm system software is not freely available to any other organisation, if the hardware is configured so that it cannot work with any other software, and the majority of other fire alarm companies capable of tendering for the contract are part of the same international group?

Has anyone successfully changed fire alarm maintenance companies, or for that matter unsuccessfully. I’d be interested in learning from your experiences.

[Chris Houston]

What type of system have you got installed.

[Guest]

Chris,

It’s a fully addressable system installed to BS5839 L1. The system has a graphics package, and includes various aspirating systems and over 20,000 field devices.

I don’t think that the difficulties involved in changing service providers is unique to one company, but appears to be an industry wide one. I have come across such problems to varying degrees with How Fire, Wormald, ADT, Gents and Gathercole.

[Chris Houston]

Sorry.  What I should have asked was:

"Who made the bits?"

[Guest]

Chris,

I don’t see that the manufacturer of the equipment/system is particularly relevant.

My concern is that once installed, many systems can only be serviced by the manufacturer.  Even where this is not the case, most service providers are tied, in some way or another, to one of a few large parent companies such as Tyco.  Service providers who are not tied to one of the parent companies are usually denied access to the software.

In my opinion, this must stifle competition in respect of price, service, and customer care.

[Gary Howe]

Tyco do not allow release of their software as its is a proprietary product. They do not want any old tom,dick or harry getting hold of the software, because they will then lose the maintenace contact for the said building (this is as we know the real reason!)

One disadvantage of having a system that can be worked on by any maintenace company is that they a problem can arise where they are unaware that they are using old versions of software to make changes, these versions often have software bugs the engineer does not know about. I have come across many incompetent engineers who have made software changes to a fire panel using illegally obtained software, who would not know one of of a PC from another.

The advantage of sticking to a proprietary product, is that the software can be updated easily, and any bugs found, can be easily rectified by upgading to the next firmware/software release.

On the upside, Tyco do allow release of their software to customers, as long as they sign a disclosure aggreement, so this may be one route you can take.

I have trained many customers (Tyco) on fire panel software cause and effect, who have obtained the software (legally), and are now maintaining the property themselves, as long as they have the correct training, knowledge and have passed the technical training course, then there is generally no problem with them having the software

Contact your local Tyco office (ADT,Wormald, etc,etc) and ask them!

Good luck


Gary.

[peterm]

Hi,

I work for Wormald, who like everyone else is owned by Tyco! I understand what you mean, the lesson is to use a company that only installs open protocol systems, like we do. Ok we are owned by Tyco, that means to the customer that we are not going to go bust over night and we can provide the expertise and service that our clients demand.

There are lots of smaller, privately owned companies you could go to but if you have a closed protocol system like ADT , Protec, Gents etc you are tied in to some extent.

Peter

[peterm]

Having said the above, we will maintain any fire alarm system be it Protec, ADT, Chubb.

If you need any further advice you can contact me on 07980716033

Peter

[Chris Houston]

Chris,

I don’t see that the manufacturer of the equipment/system is particularly relevant.

It could be relevant, but I cannot advise you unless I know this.