In order to keep total physical security costs low, facility owners must consider the annual cost of maintaining their vehicle barriers. Failure to do so leads to situations like the following.
A U.S. DoD site installed two barriers supplied by one of our competitors at one of their bases. Due to ongoing operating problems, we understand the site now budgets $130,000 per year for an outside contractor to keep these two barriers operational!
That $65,000 annual expense per barrier means that the maintenance cost for the barriers exceeded their purchase price within the first two years. After 10 years of maintenance the site will spend the barrier purchase price plus another $1.3 million just to have two functioning vehicle barriers protecting their base. That’s $650,000 for maintenance of one barrier alone!
Contrast that with the experience of PRO Barrier Engineering's customers. First, our barriers are now warranted for a full three years, not one year. Second, after the warranty expires if you contracted with PRO Barrier to perform all of the routine preventative maintenance and repair services, your cost would be on the order of $30,000 a year for two barriers. With our barriers installed at that base they would spend, over the same 10-year period, the purchase price of the two barriers plus an additional $300,000 for maintenance. Our competitor could have given their barriers to the DoD base at no charge and they would still have saved about $1 million by buying and maintaining our barriers.
In a similar situation another organization, in its haste to protect an existing facility, bought and installed inexpensive vehicle barriers, only to quickly realize they did not perform as advertised and were a maintenance nightmare. Unable to replace them because the earmarked capital equipment funds had been spent, the organization awarded another barrier manufacturing company a huge "maintenance contract" with the understanding that the problem barriers would be "maintained" by replacing them. That ploy solved the company's dilemma of how to pay for their procurement errors but brought home – yet again - the lesson of you get what you pay for.
Avoid the vehicle barrier trap; there is much more to vehicle barriers than simply the purchase price. Buy quality barriers with the industry's best warranty, follow our simple preventive maintenance guidelines, and expect years of trouble-free performance. Use those otherwise wasted vehicle barrier maintenance dollars to improve other parts of your facility's security systems.