How the Right RFP Can Ensure the Program You Buy Is the Program You Get

Campus procurement and security/public safety departments should work together to craft an RFP that will filter out less-qualified security service contractors while attracting the right companies.

Requirements Must Be Very Specific
Given the competiveness of the security industry, companies have to win market share and grow. You must hold them accountable with a clear set of requirements and careful vetting to ensure that the program you buy is the program that gets delivered. 

Consider this: we sent people to the moon and we brought them back all on the lowest bidder! However, the specifications for every component of the space program that brought our astronauts to the moon and back were painfully and expertly specified at the procurement stage. The only variable was overhead and profit for the vendors.  If the procurement specialists for security and public safety services took a similar approach with collaboration between procurement and security and public safety, the outcomes would improve considerably. 

Consider again: The average wage for a security officer might be $12 per hour with an average benefit plan. This will give the customer an average program with 40 percent turnover each year. Some will do better, some will do worse, but this is where the officer turnover rate will most likely fall. How will that affect your security program?

If everyone accepts that this is a competitive business and most companies don’t want to be the high bidder, but they know both in their hearts and intuitively that they need just a little more to break the mold and employ and retain the next level of expertise, help them help you by specifying what you want and they will respond appropriately. 

Now, if we take the same scenario and apply a $16 wage, a competitive health plan, a viable benefits plan with vacation and sick time, with an investment in training and the prerequisite experience factors mentioned earlier, the turnover rate improves and the difference to the customer is immense. The outcomes of a program like this are beneficial to the customer’s location, budget and reputation.

Why? The security and public safety program is now contributing to the overall mission of driving customers to your institution. You are now promoting an environment that is different than your competitors. With this in mind, is the $4 wage increase worth the investment? Is an average program at $1.2 million for 30 full time officers the proper investment? How about a 25-person program for the same $1.2 million? Or, maybe, is it possible the budget should have been $1.5 million all along?

RELATED: Selecting the Right Security Consultant for Your Project

Help Us Help You
I will go out on a limb with this statement: All security providers would be fighting with each other to work for an entity that built the RFP I am suggesting. What’s more, the campus customer would get a very competitive mark-up from the providers because you are eliminating risk for the contract company by setting an above average wage scale and benefit plan with training cost and benefit cost as a “pass through.”  We are able to work efficiently from a mark-up percentage if, and only if, the direct costs of wages, benefits and training lower our turnover, improve our retention and improve our customer’s satisfaction.

To do this, the RFP must drive these tenets. The RFP must require a performance-based recruiting mechanism that is verifiable and makes sense. Supervisors and patrol officers should have the background and experience they can draw from that will make them successful from the first day on the job. Access control and dispatch positions should also have the appropriate experience. Use logic and experience to build your program.

These are just a few recommendations to assist in your efforts to procure your security and public safety programs built for success (please also see 10 Steps to a New Kind of RFP on page ?? for additional tips). At G4S, we are honored to employ more than 10,000 veterans and thousands of other security personnel with various experience factors mentioned in this article.

We want the buying public to help us continue to create well-paying security jobs for our veterans and others to drive this industry to the profession it can be. To do that, healthcare and education customers must consider a new kind of RFP.

Drew Levine is president of G4S Secure Solutions North America. For more information on G4S, visit www.G4S.us

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