The unit, the owner and the job in this article are made up. We wrote it to show how we think through a building and what a complete scope looks like, because a worked example explains more than a list of services. Nothing in it is a client, a site or a job we have done.

The business, and what the owner wants

Picture a single-storey industrial unit on a side street. The office is at the front, on the street. The shop is behind it, and a loading dock opens from the shop onto a fenced yard at the side, where trucks turn and where stock sits on pallets. A sliding gate on the yard’s street side already has an operator; today it is opened with a remote, and the spare remotes have gone home with people who no longer work there.

The owner runs the business from the office and is in the shop most of the day. The brief, as the owner put it on the walk:

Staff should get in without keys, and when someone leaves, their access should stop the same day.
A visitor should not be able to walk from the office into the shop.
The owner wants to know who was at the dock, and wants to see the yard at night.
When a courier rings the front door, someone in the office should see who it is and let them in without walking up front.
Drivers should open the gate from the truck, not with a remote that keeps getting lost.
One company for all of it, including the pipe. The last job had three trades pointing at each other.

That last point decides a lot. The conduit, the cable, the door hardware, the devices, the rack and the programming are one scope here, so there is one drawing, one schedule and one crew.

The site walk

Before we quote, Mark walks the building with the owner. On a unit like this one, the walk is where the real scope is found. The things we look at:

Each door. Hollow metal or aluminum storefront, which way it swings, whether it has a closer and whether it actually closes and latches. Whether the frame is already prepared for a strike. Which doors are required exits: a required exit gets hardware that lets people out without a credential, every time.
Ceilings and walls. An open deck in the shop with exposed joists is easy to run conduit under. A finished ceiling in the office means fishing, or surface raceway where that is acceptable to the owner.
Where the rack lives. It needs power, a wall out of the dust and the forklift lane, and the internet service nearby. In this unit, the back corner of the office next to the electrical panel does the job.
The dock, from where a camera would sit. Where a truck stops, what the sun does in the afternoon, and what the light is like at night. A camera that sees a bright doorway and a dark apron sees neither well.
The fence line and the gate. How far the operator is from the building, where a trench can go without crossing the drive at a bad spot, and whether the operator has an open input a reader can drive. It does.
The fire alarm panel. The front door and the office door are on an exit route. The lock on each has to release on the fire alarm signal, so we need to know where that signal comes from and who maintains the panel.

What comes out of the walk is a plan, and the plan is what the quote is priced from.

1: Rack; A wall rack in the office, near the electrical panel and the internet service: door controller, power supply with battery, PoE switch and recorder.
2: Front door, D1; Reader and video intercom outside, electric strike in the frame, door contact and request-to-exit sensor inside.
3: Office to shop, D2; Reader on the office side so a visitor cannot walk into the shop; free exit from the shop.
4: Shop to yard, D3; Reader on the yard side, electrified exit device on the shop side, door contact.
5: Dock personnel door, D4; Reader on the yard side, electric strike, door contact with a held-open alarm; the overhead door beside it stays as it is.
6: Dock camera, C1; On the wall above the overhead door, looking along the apron: faces at the door, plates on the apron.
7: Yard camera, C2; On the building's corner, looking across the yard to the gate, with the dock camera covering what sits beneath it.
8: Gate reader; A reader on a pedestal at the gate approach, wired to the gate operator's open input. The operator and the gate are by their own supplier.
9: Underground run; Rigid conduit from the building to the pedestal and the operator, trenched and backfilled, with a pull point at the turn.

The example unit in plan: office at the front, shop behind, the dock and the yard to one side. Orange is what we install; grey is the building, the fence and the gate. Not to scale.

What we would install

The doors

Four openings get control: the front door, the door from the office into the shop, the door from the shop out to the yard, and the personnel door beside the overhead door at the dock. The overhead door itself stays as it is. Each opening gets a reader on the side you arrive from, locking hardware chosen for the door’s role, a contact that reports whether the door is shut, and a sensor on the inside that lets people out without a card.

Door schedule for the example unit
Door	What it is for	What we fit, and what opens it
D1 Front door	Staff and visitors enter here. Visitors are let in from the office.	Electric strike in the existing frame, door contact, request-to-exit sensor, closer kept. Opens with: fob or phone; video intercom to the office for visitors.
D2 Office to shop	Keeps visitors in the office and out of the shop.	Electric strike, door contact, request-to-exit sensor. Opens with: fob or phone, staff only.
D3 Shop to yard	Staff go out to the yard and back without walking round the front.	Electrified exit device with a door contact; free egress from the shop. Opens with: fob or phone from the yard side.
D4 Dock personnel door	Drivers and staff beside the overhead door. Held open on a busy day, so it is alarmed.	Electric strike, door contact with a held-open alarm, request-to-exit sensor. Opens with: fob or phone; a driver is let in from the shop.

Two of these deserve a word.

The door from the shop to the yard is an exit route from the shop, so it gets an electrified exit device: the push bar always opens it from the inside, and the reader on the yard side unlocks it to come back in. Nobody in the shop ever needs a credential to leave.

The dock door is the one that gets propped open on a busy afternoon. Its contact has a held-open alarm: after a set time open, the system logs it and the keypad in the office chirps, so the owner knows rather than finding it open at six.

The drawing below is the opening every one of these doors is built from. The parts change with the door, the idea does not.

1: Power supply / sub-controller; Class 2 power-limited supply, battery backup, fire-alarm relay interface for emergency egress release.
2: Credential reader; OSDP v2 over RS-485, encrypted. Smart card, NFC and BLE mobile credentials. Mounted within barrier-free reach range.
3: Door position switch; Concealed magnetic reed in the frame header. Reports whether the door is open or closed, and alarms when it is forced or held open.
4: Request-to-exit sensor; Shunts the door position alarm and releases the lock on approach, so egress never depends on a credential.
5: Electric strike; Fail-secure or fail-safe, field reversible, with diode suppression. Selected against the door’s life-safety role.
6: Power transfer hinge; Concealed transfer from frame to leaf, so an electrified lock body carries no exposed wiring.

A typical access-controlled door, seen from the front. Orange is what we install; grey is the building.

The cameras

Two cameras cover what the owner asked about. The dock camera mounts on the wall above the overhead door and looks along the apron: close enough to the door to make out a face, far enough along the apron to read a plate on a truck backing in. The yard camera mounts on the building’s corner and looks across the yard to the gate, so it sees a vehicle at the gate and anyone walking the yard after hours. Each covers the ground beneath the other, because a camera sees nothing directly below itself.

Both record on the recorder in the rack, so the video stays in the building if the internet drops. We give every camera a fixed address on the network during aiming, so neither one quietly disappears from the recorder a year later, and we aim them with the owner at the screen rather than from the ladder.

The front door intercom

A video intercom goes beside the front door reader. A courier presses it, the office answers on a desk phone or an app, sees who it is, and releases the front door from the desk. The same release button can open the office door for a visitor who is expected in the shop. The intercom is a network device like the cameras, on its own cable back to the switch.

The yard gate

The gate and its operator stay with their own supplier; we do not change them. What we add is a reader on a pedestal at the gate approach, at a height a driver can reach from the window, and a pair of wires from the reader’s controller output to the operator’s open input. A driver with a fob on the same system as the doors opens the gate with it, and when a driver leaves the company, the fob stops working at the gate and the doors on the same afternoon. The lost remotes stop mattering.

Pathways and conduit

Inside, the run is conduit from the rack along the office wall, along the partition and up the east wall of the shop, with a drop to each door and camera. In the shop it is surface-mounted on the block wall, where a forklift cannot reach it. In the office it goes above the ceiling.

Outside, the run to the gate is rigid conduit. It leaves the building through the wall, drops below grade, crosses to the pedestal and carries on to the operator, with a pull point at the turn so the cable can be pulled, and replaced one day, without digging. The trench, the pipe and the backfill are ours. Most low-voltage shops leave that part to an electrician, which is where the three-trades problem on the owner’s last job came from.

One rack

Everything comes home to one wall rack in the office: the door controller, a power supply with battery backup for the locks, a PoE switch that powers the cameras and the intercom over their own cables, and the recorder. The battery carries the doors through a power cut. The fire alarm signal from the building’s panel lands on the controller, and on that signal the locks on the exit route release.

1: Door controller; Decides every door. Reader, lock, door contact and request-to-exit sensor for each door come back to it on their own cable.
2: Power supply with battery; Powers the locks and the controller. The battery carries the doors through a power cut; the fire alarm signal releases them.
3: PoE switch and recorder; One cable each to the cameras and the intercom carries power and data. The recorder keeps the video on site, with its own fixed address for every camera.
4: Door runs; A multi-conductor cable to each door in conduit. Heavy orange is a door; fine orange is a network drop.
5: Gate run; Dashed where it goes underground: the reader on its pedestal, and a pair of wires to the operator's open input.
6: Fire alarm panel, by others; One signal from the building's fire alarm panel into the controller. Grey, because the panel and its wiring are someone else's.

The example unit as a riser: one line from the rack to every device, with the kind of line saying what the run carries and where it goes underground.

Programming, testing and handover

Installing the devices is the middle of the job, not the end.

We set up the owner’s access levels with the owner: staff on the doors during working hours, the owner and a second key holder at any hour, drivers on the gate only. Holidays go in the schedule. The held-open time on the dock door is agreed, not guessed.

Then every door is walked. The reader opens it, the push bar opens it, the contact reports it, the held-open alarm fires when it should, and the exit-route locks release on the fire alarm signal, witnessed with whoever looks after the panel. Each camera’s view is checked against the plan, by day and at night. The intercom is answered from the desk, and the door opens from the desk.

The owner is shown the software: how to add a person, how to remove one, how to pull up the dock at a given time. That is the part that keeps the system useful after we leave.

Handover is paper as well as a working system: an as-built drawing with every device where it actually went, a label on every cable that matches it, test results for the cable, the credential list, and the administrator login handed to the owner and nobody else.

What to expect from us

On a job like this one, the four steps are the ones on our about page: the site visit, the drawings and a line-item quote, the installation by one crew, and commissioning with every device tested and the documents handed over. The owner supplies a few things: a decision on who gets in where, an hour at the walk and an hour at the end, and the contact for the fire alarm panel.

Beyond that, the owner’s job is to run the business. Ours is to leave a system the owner can run.

A note on this example

The unit and the owner here are made up, and the decisions were chosen to show how we think rather than to describe a job we have done. A real building would move some of them. Each of the systems in this article has its own page: access control, cameras, intercoms, gates and conduit and cabling. If your building is something like this one, tell us about it.

Securing an Industrial Unit With a Yard: A Worked Example