Dead Openings: Division 8 Buys It, You Pay for the Re-Trip
You roll a crew for forty doors, nine have no power transfer, and you leave. No one buys those hours back because you don't hold the hardware contract.
Electrified locks, electric strikes, power transfer hinges, and EPTs are specified, bought, and installed under Division 8, and they do nothing at all until you terminate them. If a hollow metal frame shipped without the factory prep, or the hardware supplier value engineered an electrified function down to a mechanical one, or the wrong transfer device went in, the opening is dead and you found out by driving to it. You don't have a contract with the hardware supplier, so there's no backcharge path, and the GC files the whole thing under coordination.
The size of it
You take three to six unbudgeted re-trips per project, typically 40 to 80 field hours, on openings this trade neither buys nor controls. Those are real labor hours with no change order behind them.
Walk the openings against the door hardware submittal before you schedule a termination crew, and make that walk a priced line in the estimate so it stops going unseen inside labor. Right now the dead opening gets discovered at the door with four techs already there, which turns somebody else's coordination failure into a labor overrun on a job you bid correctly. Your job cost has no code for it, so the hours pile into general termination labor and the estimate takes the blame. Once re-trips have their own cost code charged by door number, you can put a count and a dollar figure on the table at the monthly meeting. That's the only form of this conversation that has ever produced a change order.
Three moves, in order
Step 06: Project management
Billing dates, change orders, and notices, written as standards that work without anyone following up on them.
What else costs security systems contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What security systems owners ask
Who pays when door frames aren't prepped for electrified hardware?
You roll a crew for forty doors, nine have no power transfer, and you leave. No one buys those hours back because you don't hold the hardware contract.
What does it cost?
You take three to six unbudgeted re-trips per project, typically 40 to 80 field hours, on openings this trade neither buys nor controls. Those are real labor hours with no change order behind them.
What do I do first?
Pull the door hardware submittal and build a one-page opening matrix with door number, frame prep, transfer device, lock function, and who terminates.
What are security systems contractors supposed to be making?
Security systems has 22% gross margin, 16% overhead and 6% net profit after taxes at $1M to $5M. The all-trade average is 7%, so this trade is 1 point below it. The CFOS target is 10%.
Which part of the system fixes it?
The step is number 06, project management. Billing dates, change orders, and notices, written as standards that work without anyone following up on them. It comes from chapter 6 of CONTROL: C.F.O.S. Construction Financial Operating System.
Everything on this page is something you can install yourself, and CONTROL is the order to do it in. If you would rather buy the finished result, SPM The Construction CFO does this work for security systems contractors as a service. It is a separate firm, Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, led by the same author.
Wrote CONTROL, the 8 step system behind these figures. More about the author.