Security Sales & Integration July 2023 - 14

Management
2023 Integrator
Exec Roundtable
If you had to put a percentage on it, how
much time has been lost having to deal
with that compared to what had been
more business as usual?
Grover: A year ago, my time spent was 30%
to 35%. Now, a lot of the manufacturers are
getting stabilized, but it is still 20% to 25%. As
an example, you need Cisco switches because
that's all the government will accept. Then that
vendor says your wait time is 206 days, but my
contract is 90 days and so how do I perform?
Many contracts are frozen because they won't
give us an option of putting an alternative.
What's the biggest lesson you've learned
from this experience?
Grover: Better planning, better research when
you're recommending a product. It would be
wise to spend the extra hours researching timelines
manufacturers have for their products.
As a small
business, you
have to look for
lines of credit
then because if
your switches
are not coming
for 206 days,
your other
manufacturer is
increasing the
price on cameras
after 30 days, how
do you do that?
How do you
balance that?
- Mala Grover,
CEO, Digitronics
14
Thank you; Eva, how has supply chain
impacted your business?
Mach: It has improved, but one of the things
we're seeing is there's still a level of unpredictability.
We place an order, and we are told it's
going to be three months, then it shows up
on that Monday. But overall, there has been a
definite improvement from the $2.8 million we
had on backorder status in August 2022. What
we have learned through this, by necessity, is
developing new reports and processes. We have
gotten much better at looking for alternatives
and understanding what we need to do and
when we need to do it. That will serve us well
in the future.
What creates additional challenges is that,
while we talk about open-platform systems, there
are manufacturers with large shares of the market
that are still proprietary. That makes it hard if not
impossible to implement substitutions.
Grover: Yes, they say it's an open platform
but in practice what exactly is compatible with
those particular systems? They may say it's
compatible, but to what extent? A lot of times
for video management systems, they'll say it's
an open platform, but in actuality the extent
of that capability only allows getting cameras
into the recorder. All the bells and whistles that
could be gotten from a particular product go
by the wayside because it's not that compatible.
It works, but it's not totally compatible to give
you all the features.
Security Sales & Integration JULY 2023
Mike, what are the supply chain pain
points you've gone through and what
steps have been taken?
Bradley: As far as going forward, I don't think
as an industry we have good answers. This exposed
some very serious weaknesses. For some
manufacturers we depend on, one of those
weaknesses was and remains a lack of diversity
of where they obtain components for their
products. Many single sources were exposed,
and this was not just about chips. It was about
steel, plastics and all the other components.
That's going to have to get solved, but we have
no control over that.
The other thing is nobody knew this was
coming. Nobody expected it and so they didn't
know what to do. That left everybody scrambling.
You can forgive some of the stupid things
that happened, but there's a point at which they
have to get control. It exposed the ability or inability
of certain manufacturers to react. Some
handled it better than others, and one of the
keys was communication. One of our greatest
frustrations was simply not being able to
get any answers on any expectations. We have
a higher level of trust today in some suppliers
and a lower level of trust in others.
In our world, we have a lot of proprietary
products. Open systems are a mess, as that
only works to a point. It's a case-by-case basis
as some situations can be better remedied by
alternative products than others. In some cases,
there simply aren't alternatives. In our fire/
life-safety business, you don't substitute another
manufacturer. It just doesn't happen without
a tremendous amount of pain and expense.
Another great frustration was how manufacturers
reacted to the cost. Surcharges became
the norm with a number of manufacturers,
costing us in the neighborhood of $500,000
off our bottom line. I didn't expect that money
to disappear last year. We grew 27%, but
yet my bottom line stagnated. Plus there were
more labor costs for us due to additional trips
to jobsites. Instead of doing a large project and
putting in hundreds of devices at once, we're
piecemealing with a few done on each trip.
The last thing that was frustrating is manufacturers
would ship what they could. We no
longer did ship and complete. We would get
part of the delivery, put that in and then they
would forget about the rest. That last 5% of the
job, they're trying to fulfill large orders and totally
forgot they had all these other orders they
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Security Sales & Integration July 2023

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