Tyco expands Global Center of Excellence

BIRMINGHAM, Ala.—It's like the United Nations of security at Tyco's new Global Center of Excellence. Walk through the office and you'll hear engineers speaking Chinese, Russian and Arabic. Fourteen languages are spoken here. In addition to linguistic fluency, employees must also understand the business culture in their countries of expertise, Daryl Haga, director of Tyco's GCoE, told Security Systems News.

“We hire top people who are highly educated, [many with multiple advanced degrees],” Haga said.

SSN attended the April 14 grand opening of the center. Flanked by a group of Tyco executives—including CEO George Oliver, VP global accounts Renae Leary, and Tyco Security Products president Mark VanDover—Haga cut a large red ribbon to celebrate the official opening of the new 24,000-square-foot facility.

From here, Tyco supports its global enterprise customers in 38 countries around the world. Ninety employees—design engineers, CAD operators, program managers, system engineers and others—are responsible for working with Tyco's largest customers to develop, maintain and support its customers' security operations.

They devise “global standards, technical specifications and detailed work plans” so that customers' security systems are standardized in all of its offices around the world. They also audit the systems to ensure they're working properly and are compliant with corporate standards.

While showing a group of reporters around the office, Haga pointed out how the workflow is streamlined. For example, design engineers are trained on CAD; administrative personnel take care of “repeatable processes,” freeing up design engineers for other tasks; and solutions partners are brought to Birmingham to do training so staff does not have to leave the site.

“It's all about efficiency and good, clean processes,” Haga said, adding that the group is ISO certified.

Oliver told SSN that the new center will help position “the new Tyco” for growth. “Integration capability is fundamental to our success,” Oliver said.

Tyco's enterprise-level security systems include intrusion, access control, video management, fire systems and integrated systems, but the new center will enable Tyco to tie more building systems into solutions for its global customers, he said.

One immediate opportunity is fire. According to Leary, an estimated 20 percent of Tyco's current global enterprise customers use Tyco for fire as well as security. Tyco aims to get its existing global enterprise customers to all use Tyco for fire. She predicted that the number will increase incrementally as current customers upgrade existing fire systems and/or add new facilities, and as new customers come on board.

While many global customers are still working on integrating access and video, many are starting to want to integrate fire, identity management and PSIM. “Customers are starting to try some of these things,” Leary said. “It's picking up steam [through] trials and pilot programs.”

The ultimate goal is to have all systems integrated on a single platform for these customers and to provide business intelligence, systems and solutions “to better manage data in real time and act on data immediately,” Leary said.

Leary said that the company's “core commercial business is still a huge focus for us.” Oliver added that "the new Tyco" is designed to "serve [commercial] customers top to bottom; [we're] very competitive at all levels."

In addition to integrating systems together, adding new technology will also be important to Tyco's growth and ability to serve businesses large and small, Oliver said.

He cited progress in Tyco Security Products' launch of its new Power Series NEO and with the acquisition of Exacq.