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Published on: 6/1/2008
Last Visited: 8/14/2008
Charles Schneider, president, CEO, and co-founder, said the company's strategy of creating IT-driven process controls has helped build its reputation for quality.
The company employs 24,000 uniformed guards for servicing major national clients in retail, healthcare, corporate offices, distribution centers, and government agencies.Last year, US Security Associates (USA), headquartered in Atlanta, had revenues of $634 million as a broader cross-section of industries sought protection of their assets and personnel.Schneider said the company's unique quality-control processes in recruitment, background screening, training, and monitoring of employees add significant value to clients.
US Security Associates: Uniform Security - American Executive - RedCoat PublishingCharles Schneider, President, CEO and co-founderThe company's IT processes for standardized and centrally controlled training programs garnered recognition from the American Society of Training and Development as one of the top 39 training programs in the world, among elite companies such as Verizon, Microsoft, and Merck."It illustrates an approach we take to the business—we use information technology to accomplish a very straightforward objective, but better than could ever be done before," Schneider said.
USA's program uses trainers located in Georgia who interact live over the Internet with trainees at the company's 120 branch locations.Trainees take exams for each session, providing a standard set of data for evaluating employees."What we accomplish is that we know exactly what we train, because the curriculum is all scripted and can be modified if necessary," Schneider said."We know who got trained because we track who's attending, and we know what they learned because we test them.The whole process is carefully controlled, and we think it is much better than video training.You never really know who watched a video or how much they got out of it."
Schneider said the company's focus on process extends to other checks on employee criminal record, immigration eligibility, skill certification, and licensing.
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When an employee does not check in on time, Schneider explained, the network detects an exception in the company's Georgia headquarters and dispatches a supervisor to investigate.This creates a closed loop, providing constant feedback into the system and allowing the company to take action whenever a problem arises.
"It's closing the loop on our various processes," Schneider said.
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"Our clients depend on us to have people properly background screened, licensed, and certified," Schneider said.
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We do a run on all 24,000 Social Security numbers and ensure there are no exceptions to the required paperwork," Schneider said.
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"We spend time thinking about how can we make sure that we know things get done and we aren't just hoping it happens," Schneider said.
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"We use information technology to do what we're responsible to do, without incurring additional administrative cost," Schneider said."Computers are happy to run through thousands of documents on a weekly basis to find a single exception—it's what they do well.It's not that difficult to do, but you have to have your system set up to do it."
Finally, the driving force behind these process and technology innovations is the customer, Schneider said."Even though we have grown significantly, we are aware that we are in a service business and the customer always comes first," he said.
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