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Fire alarm monitoring for investors can be the difference between investing in a brand that is well received within the public eye, and investing in one that becomes well known for being involved in a major fire incident. Smart monitoring doesn’t just protect your properties and people, it protects your brand reputation too.
Fire alarm monitoring is important as it is an effective way to protect your investments.
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In the event of a serious fire incident, you can potentially lose millions of pounds in assets in a matter of minutes. The longer it takes for emergency services to respond, the more likely it is that everything is lost to the fire.
Active monitoring reduces risk by enabling early detection and providing real-time alerts. If a fire does break out, active monitoring allows emergency services to be dispatched within seconds. It also enables a facilities manager to provide the emergency service with detailed information on the fire’s location, and the evacuation status of the building.
Simply put, fire alarm monitoring enables you to catch fire risks more quickly and reduce the amount of damage a fire can do by reacting to it rapidly.
Fires do not only cause asset damage to commercial properties, they can also hit revenue streams by triggering prolonged periods of downtime. An investment in a company that cannot continually operate effectively, is a bad investment. That’s why fire safety monitoring is such an important precaution to have in place.
Active monitoring enables businesses to run more smoothly without interruptions from fire events or false alarms by catching potential faults and potential fires early. This allows a facilities manager to plan remedial maintenance for the fire safety assets that need it, reducing the chances of downtime due to false alarms. It also gives facilities managers the opportunity to act quickly in suppressing a potential fire, before it can do any lasting damage.
Trying to manage fire risk without alarm monitoring can be very problematic. Ensuring compliance can be difficult, and legal claims can be hard to defend against without concrete evidence of your fire safety measures.
Though fire safety liability does not fall directly under the remit of an investor, it can still cause you headaches if a serious fire event takes place on one of your properties. Companies are liable for the fire safety of their properties, and personnel, and if they fail to uphold fire safety effectively they can be held accountable. Company directors can face severe personal, financial, and criminal consequences if their properties fail to meet safety standards.
The only way to protect yourself from liability, is to ensure that every rule and regulation for fire safety is followed and can be comprehensively evidenced. To do this, you need to have a record of every fire, false alarm, fire drill, asset fault, and maintenance action across all of your properties. This is very difficult to maintain through manual reporting. Especially if a lot of information is recorded on paper.
By implementing active fire monitoring software that automatically logs all fire-related events, and creates a full audit trail, you can be sure that there is a good body of proof to demonstrate effective fire safety throughout your property portfolio.
If a company you have invested in is found to be liable for a fire event, it opens them up to legal action that can be damaging and very costly. If there is no way to prove that the right checks and measures were in place prior to the fire, it is very difficult to protect a company against legal action. This can result in a company having to provide huge payouts in legal fees and compensation which can destroy your equity in the company.
In the event of a serious fire, the only way to protect a company from legal action is to prove that all required regulatory checks and measures for fire safety were in place. This is difficult to do if there are disconnected systems and reports are manually recorded, with a comprehensive body of proof being almost impossible to provide effectively. Fire alarm monitoring makes this process much easier with automatic regulatory reporting of events and a full tamper-proof audit trail for regulators and insurers.
Insurance companies take many things into account when calculating their insurance rates for companies. One of the things that can affect your insurance premiums is if there is fire safety monitoring across all properties within your portfolio.
Fire alarm monitoring is not just about getting better insurance premiums though, some insurers will require for you to have fire safety monitoring in place for your cover to be valid. In the event of an insurance claim due to a fire event, an insurance company with this policy can refuse to pay out, if there is proof that the company didn’t have active fire alarm monitoring in place.
Even if your insurance is valid, some insurance companies will look to avoid paying out due to a lack of fire safety compliance within a business. A refusal of payout due to non-compliance is a big problem that could be enabled by something as small as a clerical error. This is something that can be completely avoided by implementing smart monitoring software that automatically logs all fire safety events, and can provide a complete audit trail to regulators and insurers to prove full compliance.
A brand is only as good as its reputation. If you invest in a brand and its reputation takes a big hit, your investment can be wasted completely.
A serious fire event at a property in a company’s portfolio can result in a PR disaster. Especially if the fire safety measures were found wanting, and there was a loss of life due to the incident. It is something that can tarnish a brand’s name, leading to significant financial loss.
Fire alarm monitoring is an effective way to make these potential PR disasters extremely unlikely. Early detection of fire risks enables evacuations to be triggered before a fire becomes established. This significantly reduces the chances that an event will lead to a loss of life. Many fire events can be avoided altogether too, with fault detection and remedial maintenance fixing a problem before it can become a significant fire risk.
While the current regulations for fire safety compliance allow for manual reporting and paper documentation, there is a clear preference for digital reporting that is easy to access and can be provided in multiple formats.
Rather than waiting for fire regulations to move towards a digital-first approach and trying to keep up with them as they evolve, it is much more efficient and cost-effective to commit to digital reporting and fire alarm monitoring now. This will futureproof your company against regulation changes, and allow your fire safety solution to evolve alongside new fire safety regulations going forward.