(Editor’s note: This is Part II and our concluding blog from H&S Protection’s Jeff Lukasavige. If you’d like to contribute a guest blog, please contact Mike Horgan at [email protected].)

In our last blog, I addressed access control issues for office buildings. This week, I want to drill down into specific areas within an office environment and discuss those unique security needs.

Human Resource Departments often handle sensitive and personal employee information that must be protected. Documents with employees’ information may be lying on desks in view of others walking through the area, where someone could use a smart phone to snap quick photos to steal sensitive information. To prevent that, businesses should consider the need for special access to HR departments. Not all companies require this, but if the need for privacy, discretion and/or sensitive conversations is a concern, you might want to consider restricting access to the department with effective access control.

The executive suite is another area where you may need to pay particular attention. Disgruntled employees or even customers could find their way to this area. Work interruptions may also be a consideration. While many companies have open door policies, if you are in an industry involved in controversial issues, restricted access to the executive suite may be necessary.

Similarly, the mailroom is an area you should look at closely. Depending of the size of your company, you could be getting thousands of pieces of mail a day, including personal information, account numbers, social security numbers and birth dates or other protected information. Don’t place your company at risk for customers’ identity theft. Unauthorized individuals or employees could steal personal information and use it to hack your company’s accounts, employees’ personal information, or steal a customer’s identity. Lock it down and control access – that protects your information.

Good access control requires you to consider who should be onsite and when. You should also look at who (employees, contractors, customers) should be in specific areas inside your building, and the time of day that they should be granted access.

Think of access control for your office building as employee, customer and company protection. Taking measures to provide additional protection demonstrates your company’s genuine concern for its employees. The security/access control measures you implement could prevent a difficult situation from occurring.

As a new year unfolds, many people set goals and resolutions for improvement.  That happens on an individual level and at businesses.  It’s good to assess what’s been working right and look into what’s working wrong (or not quite up to your expectations) to figure out what needs to change.

At H&S Protection, we take the approach of continually looking at what is and isn’t working for our customers so we can bring you a better installation experience, improved technology and higher quality monitoring.  This doesn’t just happen at the start of a new year.  We want our sales and service personnel to always dig deeper with every customer to see what works best for them.

Because every home and business is unique, what we bring to you should be tailored to your special needs.  And that means every time our people get in their trucks or cars, we must think about how to do things just a little bit differently.

There isn’t going to be a drastic change in our team or business this year.  But what we do expect is to keep offering you fresh ideas from a security perspective.  We hope you come to us for advice.  We hope when we provide you an exceptional experience that you recommend us to your friends, neighbors and colleagues.  If we continue to change in the right ways, those results should occur.

We look forward to every new year.  There’s always a push at this time of year for people to examine roadblocks and figure out how to knock them down.  At H&S, rather than waiting for January 1 to arrive, we work at that year-round, and we hope that shows in the better ways we help our customers day-in and day-out.

For the uninitiated, when you purchase an alarm system, one of the most important functions you are getting is a trained team to monitor activations that occur.  If your home or business has an intrusion, break-in or breach, that signal is immediately transmitted to our monitoring center, where well-trained personnel respond quickly and appropriately to get in touch with the customer and find out what, if anything, is wrong at the site.

There are times when our monitoring personnel will contact you, and nothing occurred at your home or business.  We confirm with you that the alarm is not signifying a break-in during this type of situation.  That’s an added service that helps prevent unnecessary calls to the local police department for them to dispatch officers to the location.  Those calls also build a stronger bond with our customers by opening the lines for communicating issues of concern.

Once activated, your alarm system communicates various types of signals to the monitoring center.  Information sent to the monitoring center may include:

Intrusion Alarms (e.g. doors, windows, glass break and motion sensors) are active when the system is armed. The monitoring center’s standard response is to verify the alarm by calling the site first. If an authorized person does not cancel the alarm, the authorities are dispatched, and the monitoring center attempts to notify one of your contacts.

Fire Alarms (e.g. smoke and heat detectors, water flow, and fire alarm pull stations) are active 24 hours a day. The monitoring center will try one designated phone number before dispatching the fire department. After dispatching the fire department, the monitoring center will try to contact someone on your call list. Note: Some municipalities require that systems monitoring commercial sites notify the fire department first (prior to making any other calls). IMPORTANT: We strongly advise that dispatch of FD is cancelled only if you are 100{59b821151e39af42eef718daa0ebc6fb83107991e252daffe9897dd321f5d2cf} certain the alarm is false and you know what caused the alarm.

Environmental or Equipment Signals (e.g. carbon monoxide detectors, water and temperature sensors, and equipment failures) are usually active 24 hours a day. The monitoring center will attempt to notify you or one of your contacts if these signals are received.

Trouble Signals are active 24 hours a day. They alert you to problems with the system. Signals could include communication problems, low batteries, and faulty sensors. The command center will attempt to notify someone of these signals. You may instruct the monitoring center to hold these calls for daytime notification only.

For more information on H&S, check out our web site, https://hsprotection.net/, follow us on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/HS-Protection-Systems-392800740911023/, or Twitter (@HSProtection).

(Editor’s Note: This is Part III in a series on the history of H&S Protection Systems.)

After Sentra Protective Services and Horgan Sales joined forces to become H&S Protection Systems, the question for the business was: What’s next? The year was 2007. The nature of the security industry was about to change.

Until that time, the home security market boomed. Many businesses were modeled on providing home and business security, as well as fire alarms and perhaps carbon monoxide protection. H&S was not the exception. In 2008, the major recession hit, impacting security services along with nearly every business in the United States. Your “typical” security company had to change.

H&S was ahead of the ball, looking at how to increase our reach and determine what came next in terms of our customers’ needs. That’s always been our focus, and because of the nature of the security market and the national economy at the time, we looked at how to complement our expertise as we became one company, and also how to best share that with customers.

With strengths in sales, finances and operations, as well as similar types of customers and equipment from the two initial companies, H&S was able to interlock our customer base. This allowed us to respond quickly to any service issues, and focus strongly on our local bases in the communities we served. We hang our hats on this – being there on-time with answers that make sense, then delivering effective and intelligent solutions.

Yes, we’ve grown. We’ve added services, like a stronger video platform, as customers seek additional technologies to protect their homes and businesses. But in many ways, we’re still the same as we were before the merger: Knowing our customers, being accessible and finding out what you want before proposing how we can help.

When Ed Horgan ran the business, he got out of the fire protection service when it became clear that it was not viable for our model. He looked into alarms and other areas for growth. He changed the business in a good way, one that helped put us where we are today.

We will continue to change in a good way for our employees and our customers. We look forward to serving our Wisconsin customers many years into the future, and hope you let us know how we’re doing.