This reply is based mainly on business situation in India and may not be applicable in other markets with labor shortage and expenses.
In our opinion, for DIY systems like wire-free or wireless systems with small number of cameras (<=8), their is no need of AMC contracts with any vendor. Since you have installed it yourself, you can make an effort to troubleshoot & maintain it yourself. If you have got such setup installed by a vendor, then its better you engage him on a per call basis to maintain rather than enter into an AMC contract with him. The vendor is not going to make a loss and their is not much money to be made by him anyways. If a camera or SD card or adapter or battery needs replacing, just pay him to replace it.
However the same strategy may not be useful for larger camera setups involving 16/32 cameras or more if using wired PoE installation (both centralized and decentralized designs). Often such setups are outside your home in apartment complex, where you have no business of doing DIY activities. You may need to use ladders, power tools, etc which only a professional installer has. The question here is whether you should do an on-call maintenance or AMC contract. In our opinion for <32 cameras (or in worst case 64 cameras) and simple setups on-call maintenance is just fine, and you can keep switching vendor if a particular one is slow to fix or does not give a satisfactory service. Remember engaging an on-call service requires you to spend your personal effort for coordination & management (this need maybe very low for small systems but can be substantial for large systems)
But for bigger or complex setups (involving smart switching, optical fibers, elevators, etc) involving more than 32 cameras and 2 NVRs, you should engage the services of a professional installer/maintainer on a maintenance contract basis as you simply will not have the resources, tools and time to do it. Such contracts can be of two types:
(1) Comprehensive - Both Parts and Labor covered AND are costly. This is similar to insurance and will go up as time progresses (more parts expected to fail). Enterprises, Medium to Large Commercial establishments, Senior Citizen homes, etc would like to use this method and outsource this activity completely. It is very hard to judge what the right pricing & terms should be and MOST small installers will never enter into such contracts because of the risks involved. The upside of this is that vendor will do very good job as he can minimize failures and maximize profits with that approach and the customer has to spend very little effort & time on this. Done well this is what should be done. Big installers and security firms prefer to enter into such contracts as they can potentially profit and have the resources to manage well.
(2) Non-Comprehensive - Only labor covered. For parts, the customer has to pay separately. Most small installers prefer this as this reduces their risk exposure and they can focus on what's the work and what's the remuneration for it and whether its profitable enough for their time. They may also like to retain such work to showcase their capability and get more work elsewhere. Its also fair on the customer as he has control on maintenance costs. However the downside of this is that the vendor does not have a very big incentive of doing a good job as he is *not accountable for failed active components (cameras, recorders, storage media, hard disks) and cables rarely fail completely by themselves unless compromised by rodents, elements, vandalism (which anyways they will try to get indemnity from in the contract). So having a water tight contract listing down activities to be performed AND ensuring that those are carried out properly falls on the customer. And often the AMC providere will have a big list of rather important *exclusion clauses in the agreement for common problems to protect (reduce) his *contract covered effort investment. So there is a constant tug-of-war between the parties.
Our community has chosen Option (2) - Non-Comprehensive maintenance contract presently AND have been using it by donating personal spare time and part of weekend to keep the large system running for 3+ years now. Out of 450 cameras, despite our strong design, installation, and maintenance practice, 2-3 cameras cameras go down every month and we need corrective maintenance work at-least once a month on average to bring them back up (usually cables have to be re-terminated or some entity restarted or some consistency check done on storage media or even a faulty camera replaced). We intend with this process, to keep the system running for 12 years at-least before we start upgrading equipment. and we are paying 2.5-3% of system installation CAPEX cost *annually for non-comprehensive maintenance (a 12 year contract will cost upwards of 30% and bring stable long time revenue to our system integrator)
Our contract template and verification checklists are attached:
If you go through them, you will get an idea over the whole CCTV system maintenance concept & activities.
- Suman Kumar Luthra @ APRC-P3 Telecom Sub-Committee
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