Warehouse and distribution · Western and Upstate New York
Security for buildings with a wall that opens every morning
Three sides of a distribution center are a perimeter. The fourth is a row of doors standing open all day, with vehicles reversing into them and people you do not employ walking through. That is not a flaw in the design. That is the design.
- Dock and yard designed as the boundary that actually exists
- Detection selected for high bay and racking that moves
- Driver and contractor credentials that expire on their own
- NYS Dept. of State licensed
Designing for the burglar and ignoring the daytime
A commercial building has a boundary you can draw on a plan. A distribution center has one for perhaps ten hours out of twenty four. For the rest of the working day it has a row of openings large enough to drive a trailer into, traffic moving in both directions through them, and a steady population of drivers who work for somebody else entirely.
That changes what the security problem actually is. Most loss in this sector does not happen at three in the morning through a roof hatch. It happens during the working day, through a legitimate door, attached to a legitimate transaction that was slightly wrong. Designing carefully for the burglar and treating the open hours as somebody else's problem is the most common and most expensive mistake made in this building type.
What makes it different
Six things a distribution center does that an office never does
Each of these has an obvious answer that turns out to be wrong, and each one is visible in about twenty minutes to somebody who has stood at a dock while it was running rather than after hours.
For most of the working day your real security boundary runs along the dock face and out into the yard, not around the exterior wall. A design that protects the wall is protecting a line that is not there at the hours when everything happens.
Drivers arrive, come inside, use facilities, and leave. They appear on no roll call and in no HR record. They are not a threat by default; they are simply outside every system your building has for knowing who is in it.
Camera sightlines and detection both get designed around a layout, and layouts change when a customer changes. A camera that covered an aisle six months ago now looks at the end of a rack run, and nobody logs that as a security event.
High bay space is a different discipline. Smoke spreads and cools before it reaches a ceiling device, or forms a layer beneath the deck. A detector chosen because it works in the office is a detector that reports late in the warehouse.
Trailers loaded and left overnight, occasionally carrying more value than anything on the racks inside. Lighting, gates, and outdoor coverage are usually the weakest part of an otherwise competent system, because they were priced last.
Peak brings temporary staff, compressed onboarding, and heavy credential churn at precisely the moment nobody has time to administer it carefully. Then peak ends, and the credentials frequently do not.
What we handle
Built around the hours the building is open
Dock and yard video
Positions chosen for what each one has to resolve rather than for coverage on a plan, with retention set to when a discrepancy is actually discovered rather than to a default.
Video surveillanceAccess control and driver routing
Credentialed staff entry, a defined route for drivers that does not cross the pick floor, and contractor credentials that expire on the contract rather than on somebody's memory.
Access controlIntrusion with partitioning
Areas arming independently so shipping, the pick floor, the office, and maintenance can run on different hours without one schedule being defeated on behalf of everybody.
Intrusion detectionFire alarm design and stamped drawings
Stamped drawings from New York State licensed Professional Engineers, with high bay detection selected for the ceiling and the storage rather than for a corridor.
Fire alarmTemperature and environmental monitoring
Cold storage, freezer, and mechanical spaces where a failure over a weekend costs more than any theft would, reporting to the same station as fire and intrusion.
Integrated systemsMulti site consistency
One design repeated properly across buildings, so an area manager reviewing four sites in an afternoon is looking at one system rather than learning four.
Where it actually happens
Everything concentrates at the dock
Draw a heat map of risk in a distribution center and it is almost entirely the dock and the twenty feet either side of it. That is where the boundary is open, where non-employees stand, where goods change custody, and where the paperwork and the physical movement are supposed to agree and occasionally do not.
The useful consequence is that coverage there has to be genuinely good rather than nominally present. Not a wide shot of the dock from across the building, which is what most sites have, but positions able to establish which door, which trailer, which pallet, and which person, at a time that reconciles with your warehouse system.
Nearly every footage argument we get called into after an incident is lost at the dock, and lost the same way. The camera was there. The image could not resolve what was needed at the distance it was mounted. And the recorder clock was off by enough that nothing could be tied to a transaction with confidence.
- A position per dock door, not one wide shot across the building
- Images that resolve at the distance the camera is actually mounted
- The interior side of the dock covered, not only the exterior
- Recorder clock verified, so timestamps reconcile with your systems
- Retention set to when a discrepancy is found, not to a default
- Somebody on site who can export footage without calling a vendor
Outside the building
The yard is the part nobody budgets for
Interior systems get specified carefully because they are easy to specify. The yard gets whatever budget survives, which is how a site ends up with excellent coverage of a pick aisle and nothing usable of the acre where the loaded trailers sit overnight.
A dropped trailer can hold more value than a week of picks, sitting outside the building envelope with nothing but a seal and a fence between it and a road. It is worth knowing which of your parking positions are the exposed ones.
Where the site boundary is actually enforced, and whether anybody would notice a vehicle that arrived without a reason. Gate control that reads a plate or a credential turns a fence into a record.
Cameras cannot produce an image that the light does not support, and a yard lit for forklift safety is not necessarily lit for identification. This is the cheapest improvement available on most sites and the one least often made.
Yard trucks, fuel, pallets, and whatever has accumulated along the fence line. Portable, valuable, outside, and rarely counted until somebody notices it is short.
How a project runs here
Five phases, and the first one happens while you are shipping
A distribution center surveyed after hours looks like a warehouse. Surveyed during a shift it looks like the building you actually need to protect, which is a different one.
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01
Walk it with the doors open
During a shift, at the dock, watching what actually happens: where drivers go, which doors stay open, where the paperwork changes hands, and which parts of the building nobody can see from anywhere.
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02
Define the real boundary
Where the site boundary sits, where the building boundary sits, and where the boundary between the dock and the pick floor should sit, which is the one most sites have never drawn at all.
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03
Design for the images you need
Each camera specified for what it must resolve at its actual mounting distance and in the light that will be there, plus detection selected for the ceiling height and the storage arrangement underneath it.
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04
Install around the shipping schedule
Phased so the docks keep running, with any period a system is impaired planned in advance rather than discovered on a Monday, and cutovers scheduled against your quiet hours rather than ours.
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05
Prove it, then keep it current
Verify the clock, test an export end to end, train two people to pull footage, then schedule inspection and revisit coverage whenever the racking layout changes materially.
Across Western and Upstate New York
Sites we work in
Buildings where the inventory belongs to somebody else and the customer's expectations, audits, and claims all arrive alongside it.
Freezer and chilled space where temperature monitoring matters as much as security, and where a device selected for a dry warehouse does not survive the first winter.
High volume, high piece count, seasonal labor swings, and shrink that shows up at a cycle count rather than as an event anybody witnessed.
Small high value items, constant outbound flow, and a peak period that roughly doubles the number of people in the building for two months.
Where finished goods and raw materials sit alongside a plant, and the arming schedule has to satisfy production and shipping at the same time.
Almost nothing stored and almost everything moving, where the entire operation is the part of a warehouse that is hardest to watch.
Why GSMG
We design for the hours you are open
Every camera is specified for a job
A position is chosen for the image it has to produce at the distance it will sit and in the light that will be there. Coverage on a plan and a usable image are different things, and the difference only becomes visible on the day it matters.
Licensed engineers on the life safety side
All of our engineers are New York State licensed Professional Engineers, which matters most in high bay space where detection selection is a genuine engineering question rather than a product choice.
One firm across the whole site
Video, access, intrusion, fire, and environmental designed together, so a dock event arrives with the badge record and the clip already attached rather than as three separate questions.
Our own UL listed Central Station
Fully redundant, with landline and cell backup, answered by people who work for the firm that designed the system rather than by a wholesale operation reading your site as an account number.
Common questions
Before you call
How much video retention do we actually need?
Longer than most sites have, and the way to work it out is not a rule of thumb. Retention should be set by when you would discover you need the footage, which in distribution is usually a cycle count, a customer claim, or an audit rather than the day of the event itself. Go back through your last three investigations and see how far back each one had to reach. That number is your answer, and it is frequently well beyond whatever the recorder was configured with at installation.
How should we handle drivers?
By giving them a defined route rather than a rule. Most sites have a policy about where drivers may go and no physical arrangement supporting it, so drivers end up walking through the pick floor because that is where the door is. A controlled route to a driver area, a boundary between the dock and the floor, and coverage of both is a design answer to a problem that signage has never solved anywhere.
Our racking changed and half the cameras now look at a rack end.
Extremely common, and worth treating as a scheduled event rather than a surprise. Racking layouts change with customers and seasons, and camera coverage does not move itself. The practical fix is to review coverage whenever the layout changes materially, and where a site reconfigures often, to favor positions that survive a change: aisle ends, cross aisles, and the dock, rather than down a single aisle that may not exist next quarter.
What works for detection in high bay space?
It depends on the ceiling height, the airflow, and what is stored underneath, which is a real answer rather than a hedge. Beam and aspirating approaches both exist for exactly this and they suit different buildings. What does not work is a spot detector chosen because it works in the office wing. Storage arrangement matters too, because what is on the racks affects both how a fire develops and what the detection has to see.
Can one design work across several of our sites?
Yes, and it is worth insisting on. Consistent camera positions and naming across buildings means an area manager reviewing four sites is using one system rather than learning four, and it makes a regional investigation possible rather than painful. The standard stays constant; the implementation varies with each building's shape, which is why we survey them individually before writing it.
Can you monitor freezer and cold storage temperatures?
Yes, and those signals can report to the same Central Station as your fire and intrusion systems, which means a failure at two in the morning reaches a person rather than a log file. One thing to check first: if you hold product under a customer or regulatory requirement that specifies its own monitoring, calibration, or record keeping, tell us what applies and we will design to it rather than around it.
Will you take over systems another company installed?
Regularly, and it rarely means replacing panels or recorders. We assess what is installed and still reporting, tell you which cameras are producing a usable image and which are producing reassurance, verify the recorder clock, restart the inspection cycle, and move monitoring to our own station. On multi site operations the first useful output is usually a plain comparison of what each building actually has.
Walk the dock with us during a shift
Not after hours with the doors down. An hour at the dock while it is running tells us more than any drawing, and you will get an honest account of which of your cameras would actually have helped. No charge either way.