Demand in the physical security industry keeps growing at lightning pace: the market is growing at about 6.5% per year and is estimated to reach a $216 billion market size by 2030.
In theory, this is good for system integration businesses. Growing demand should feel like a win: more prospects means more customers means more profit, right?
Many integrators riding the demand wave are running into higher stress and greater frustration, not sunny skies and pure profit. More bids, more site surveys, more pressure to move faster—but the processes that have worked for years aren’t scaling or speeding up.
This is the demand dilemma: how can system integrators scale output to meet rising demand, without sacrificing accuracy, professionalism, or margins?
Why Manual Site Surveys Become a Bottleneck as You Grow
For many integrators, the way they run their sales qualification and proposal processes is one of the biggest hindrances to successful growth. What worked when volume was manageable isn’t holding up as demand increases, and yesterday’s status quo isn’t fast or accurate enough for evolving customer expectations.
Take the pen-and-paper site survey process. The cracks were always there, but now that demand is accelerating, those cracks start to show—and weigh down your ability to scale with demand.
These are a few of the common issues integrators experience in a security assessment:
- Inconsistent notes from different team members
- Missing details discovered after the site visit
- Photos and sketches that lack context
All of these slow down design and proposal processes: they lead to miscommunications, time-draining rounds of back-and-forth with customers, and rework.
The Hidden Costs of the Pen-and-Paper Approach
Some of the costs of the pen-and-paper approach are hard to see. The status quo feels normal, and it can be difficult to see through it if you haven’t seen a better alternative.
Consider these costs—all of which are avoidable with some smart process changes we’ll outline a little later.
- Time lost rewriting notes into usable formats: Handwritten notes from the site survey lack context and can be difficult to decipher later on. There are no checks on them, either: if those notes contain inaccuracies, it’s difficult to know or spot them.
- Back-and-forth between sales and engineering to clarify details: Sales and engineering want different things out of a site survey, and they can’t read each other’s minds. Integrators lose time and risk accuracy during this kind of back-and-forth.
- Design assumptions made because information is incomplete: Mistakes here can be extremely costly if they lead to rework or a change order you can’t pass on to the customer.
- Revisions, rework, and change orders that eat into margins: Employee time is money. The more you burn redoing work, the worse your margins look.
- Lost opportunities: Pen-and-paper approaches are slow. While you’re struggling to keep up with proposal volume, you’ll likely lose some of those leads to competitors who deliver proposals faster.
Crucially, all of these hidden costs multiply as your sales volume increases. Every single problem and frustration compounds when you’re chasing even 25% more leads than before. Resources get spread thinner and could, for example, even mentally mix up details between proposals. Delays on one proposal cascade into the next one in the queue, and so forth.
Rework: Cost of Doing Business, or Profit-Eater?
It’s worth diving deeper on the question of rework. According to the status quo or conventional wisdom, rework is unavoidable. It’s just a cost of doing business, something everyone has to deal with.
But is this conventional wisdom actually wise? Or is the smarter approach to look at rework as a profit-eater, then find ways to eliminate it?
The truth is that rework, whether small or big, causes project problems and eats into your profit margins.
When you bid on a job, operations or project managers are responsible for that job being profitable. If you didn’t get the right information before technicians roll, that becomes a change order. When this is your company’s fault, not the client’s, often it isn’t feasible to bill the client for that change.
Tally up the costs involved here:
- More nights in the hotel, meals
- Additional truck rolls
- Cost of the missed equipment or hardware
- Labor wages
Beyond these, business owners also have to consider lost opportunity cost. Technicians that have to stay extra days or trucks that have to roll an extra time to a job site—those are techs and trucks you can’t assign to the next job.
Shelby Chatigny is an account executive here at System Surveyor. Before joining our team, she worked on both the manufacturer and system integrator sides of physical security, and she shared with us a real-life story of how even a tiny on-paper mistake made a 5-figure impact:
“Early on as a system integrator, I went on a site walk but didn’t have my iPad with me. I had to go pen-and-paper: I printed a map, wrote notes, and snagged some photos on my phone. I failed to write down a tiny detail: that certain doors needed cabling. We sold the job and signed the contract, only for our techs to notice the proposal didn’t include materials or labor for that cabling. It was a tiny omission, the kind of thing that I thought would be easy to catch back at the office—and it nearly sunk the project. We went from profitable to $15,000 in the red.”
Even though Shelby was able to work this out with the customer, her company still lost both time and trust reworking the proposal, renegotiating, and fixing the problem. As system integrators seek to gain long-term clients, building trust is essential. Rework mistakes erode that trust; accurate, decision-ready proposals increase it.
The Cost of Inaction
Before we show you the process shift necessary to break through the demand dilemma, let’s think through the cost of inaction. The status quo is a powerful influence, but sticking to it is costing your business, both in how many jobs you win and how profitable each one of those jobs is.
In other words: doing nothing isn’t a neutral choice. Not taking action is a kind of action, because it means you remain slower, less accurate, and less able to scale up to take on new work.
Fixing the Demand Dilemma Requires a Process Shift
Trying to work faster with the same manual workflow doesn’t work. Instead, it reveals and amplifies existing problems. Instead, integrators need a process shift if they want to scale their business.
Sustainable growth requires changing how security surveys, designs, and proposals flow together. At the core of this process shift: integrators must automate and standardize the site survey and design process.
The goal is not more tools, but fewer gaps between steps. Each step removes friction, reduces rework, and protects accuracy. When combined, these steps create a repeatable, scalable workflow.
Step 1 – Standardize What You Capture During Every Site Survey
Manual processes tend toward individualism: your veteran integrators have their unique ways of doing things that work for them—but might not work as well for technicians or engineers, and might not work at all for inexperienced integrators.
By standardizing the security requirements you capture and how you capture it across every site survey and every team member, you ensure critical details are never skipped and that information is captured in consistent, repeatable ways.
This first step reduces dependence on individual experience and paves the way for effective automation.
Step 2 – Capture Site Data Digitally at the Source
Next is moving from handwritten notes to structured digital inputs with the right security solution. Site surveys should capture a greater level of detail than pen-and-paper can achieve, including:
- Specific measurements
- Device locations
- Coverage details
- Supporting infrastructure (cabling, sensors, etc.)
With a digital site survey platform, integrators can attach photos to site plans in real time, with real context, eliminating the need to clean up surveys later on.
Step 3 – Connect Site Surveys Directly to System Design
Transcribing or even translating a standalone site survey into a system design is a significant weak point in pen-and-paper workflows because details tend to get lost in the process. But by conducting your security site survey directly in a digital system design, you can capture richer site data without the risk of interpretation errors between sales and engineering.
With the right platform, you can turn site data into design-ready information. You can even build out that design on site with the customer, capturing information that you otherwise wouldn’t get until a revision request.
Step 4 – Use Automation to Reduce Rework and Delays
Anything that can be automated safely, should be. Removing manual steps speeds up system design and lessens error rates, which reduces rework and delays.
Not every system design needs to be built from scratch. Many elements (like a door, sensor, access control module, and requisite wiring) are repeated throughout a project or even similar or identical across projects. By designing that door package once, you can remove repetitive manual steps and reduce the risk of missing an element here or there.
As you drag and drop security device elements into your system design, for example, a bill of materials is automatically generated in the background. This saves your sales team and designers a significant amount of time and is less prone to errors so you can get to a decision-ready proposal faster.
Automated data handling can help, too: anywhere you’re manually re-entering the same data, you introduce more risk of mistyping, missing a field, and so forth.
Step 5 – Deliver Clear, Professional Decision-Ready Proposals
Many modern buyers expect more than a text-heavy detailed report. They want to see what security measures you’re proposing, not just read about it. Digital system design is visual, built on top of a floor plan or satellite imagery. Customers can more easily see coverage angles and understand system intent, giving them a chance to spot weaknesses or gaps much earlier in the process.
By handing your customers decision-ready proposals for a physical security system they can visualize and understand, you shorten the sales cycle and build trust. You also save on rework and delays because everyone can see what’s really being proposed from the start.
How These Steps Help You Serve More Customers Without Burning Out
When you put these 5 key steps together using a modern digital system design platform, here’s what you can expect:
- Faster turnaround without rushing work.
- More detail and more accuracy from the start.
- Visual system designs that customers can understand and collaborate on.
- Less pressure on senior staff to fix issues.
- Junior team members contribute more effectively.
- Serving more customers without increasing chaos.
All together, you’ll grow your capacity, speed, accuracy, and attractiveness to customers because you’ll be delivering a better decision-ready proposal faster than before.
Solving the Demand Dilemma the Right Way
Solving the demand dilemma starts with seeing that it’s not only a demand problem. Often, the issues getting in the way of growth are outdated workflows and technology.
Given the growth in the industry overall, growth for your system integration company is there for the taking. And it doesn’t have to come at the cost of quality.
Digital site surveys and automated design processes with a platform like System Surveyor create a path to sustainable growth. By increasing accuracy, improving visibility, and speeding up the timeline to a decision-ready proposal, system integrators can grow the right way even as they increase the quality of their system designs. With the right foundation, scale and quality can grow together, not compete. Start your free System Surveyor trial today.
Demand Dilemma FAQs
Manual processes are imprecise, slow, and inconsistent. What works with a small client load starts to break down as you grow.
Digital site surveys allow for much greater detail and enable integrators to attach those details to to-scale site plans, including accurate device specifications.
Yes: automatically identifying exact areas of coverage, generating an automated bill of materials, and templating similar configurations all save significant time and can even increase quality.
No, but they will enable all team members at all experience levels to work with greater speed and accuracy.
With a standardized workflow, newer team members can be more confident that they haven’t overlooked details or skipped steps.
Maureen Carlson is co-founder and president of System Surveyor, the leading digital platform for physical-security site surveys and system design. With 25 + years in B2B SaaS and security technology, she leads the go-to-market and operations with a top notch team. Under her leadership, System Surveyor has grown into an industry-defining software used worldwide to streamline system design, enable collaboration, and raise the bar for security and technology professionals. Maureen enjoys building relationships in the industry and user community to build sustainable, high growth business. In her spare time in beautiful Austin, you’ll find her spending time outdoors, on a tennis court, reading or with family and friends.
