Pre-purchase design review

This is a short, fixed engagement. You send the proposal, the drawings, and the bill of materials. I tell you what is right, what is oversized, what is undersized, what is missing, and what is going to come back as a change order in month four. I sell no hardware, no software and no installation, so there is no alternative I am steering you toward. See the independence policy.

What gets checked

• Does the design meet the requirement. Coverage against the actual use case, not against a camera count. Identification, recognition and detection are different requirements and get quoted as though they are the same one.
• Sizing. Storage and retention against the real policy, recorder and server capacity against real load, network capacity against real bitrates, power and battery against real draw.
• The network underneath. Almost always the thinnest part of a security quote, and the part that causes the failures later.
• Scope holes. Cabling, containment, licensing, storage expansion, commissioning, documentation, training, warranty terms. What is excluded is where the money goes.
• Lifecycle exposure. Whether you are being sold something already near end of support, and what the upgrade path costs.
• Price sanity. Whether the numbers are defensible against what this work ordinarily costs, and where the margin is hiding.

What usually turns up

The same handful of things, on system after system, from vendors who are not being dishonest so much as optimistic in their own favour.

• Retention calculated at a bitrate nobody will actually run once the picture is set up properly, so the storage is short by a third from day one.
• Camera counts that cover the floor plan but miss the two views the system exists for.
• Switches sized for the port count and not for the PoE budget or the traffic.
• Licensing that covers the initial device count and nothing beyond it.
• No commissioning criteria, so acceptance becomes a conversation instead of a test.
• An integration described as included that is a separate paid module.

Who this is for

• Owners and facility managers holding a quote they cannot technically evaluate.
• Procurement teams who need a defensible reason to accept or push back.
• Architects and consultants whose security scope sits outside their own expertise.
• Anyone whose last system did not do what they thought they were buying.

What you get

• A written review of the proposal, organised by what it costs you to ignore.
• Specific questions to put back to the vendor, written so they cannot be answered vaguely.
• A clear position on whether to proceed, proceed with changes, or re-tender.
• A working session to go through it and decide what to do.

Fixed price, scoped to the size of the proposal, agreed before the work starts. If the design turns out to be sound, that is the finding, and it is worth knowing with confidence before you commit.