Three quotes, three different systems.
Three contractors quoting the same building will describe three different jobs, so the totals are the least comparable numbers on the page. What makes them comparable is a scope written by the building, not a spreadsheet.
QUESTION ANSWEREDHow does a management committee compare three security system quotations that each describe a different job?
Three quotations for the same building will list different equipment, different quantities and different exclusions, which makes the totals meaningless on their own. Compare them by normalising to the scope instead: what each one covers, what each one leaves out, and what the building would have to buy separately to make each proposal complete.
- 01Three totals differ because three proposals describe three different jobsIDENTIFIED
- 02By-law 3(7) requires a fair and transparent tender and prescribes no methodSTATED
- 03Assign a required image level to each named position, then compare answersMEASURED
- 04Ask what year two costs and whether spare parts sit inside the rateSEPARATED
- 05Make every bidder state compliance and price each variation separatelyWRITTEN
Why three totals for one building are not three prices
Three quotations for the same building are not three prices. They are three descriptions of three different jobs, each with its own camera count, its own recorder, and its own unwritten list of what the building buys separately.
A wide spread gets read as padding. The UK advisory service CCTV Information puts it the other way round: “The more difficult it is to comprehend a specification; the greater will be the variation in tender prices.” The spread is a symptom of the buyer’s document. Three contractors reading a brief that says “upgrade the CCTV” will each fill the silence differently, and each will be right.
Malaysian law requires the tender to be run properly and says nothing about how. By-law 3(7) in the Third Schedule to the Strata Management (Maintenance and Management) Regulations 2015 obliges the management body to “set up, manage and maintain proper procurement procedures and tender process in a fair and transparent manner”. It prescribes no number of quotations, no threshold and no method. The duty is real and the standard is entirely self-set. Building the case that follows is covered in specifying and funding the work.
Statutory text quoted on this page is the Unannotated Statutes of Malaysia reproduction, incorporating amendments to 1 June 2015; check the gazetted text before relying on it.
Is there a Malaysian standard to measure a proposal against?
None that this research could find. Nothing located in Malaysian law or published guidance tells a building what image quality a lift lobby needs, how long footage should be kept, or what a working system has to achieve. The gap shows in the retrieval too: a Malaysian government subdomain, cimsdev.cidb.gov.my, cited as a source on writing a CCTV tender scope of works, serves nothing but a default web server whose entire page text is the words “IIS Windows Server”.
The nearest usable document is Singaporean. The Singapore Police Force publishes a video surveillance standard for buildings, described in its own words as “a set of recommendations to guide building owners”. It carries no force in Kuala Lumpur, and it recommends where a Malaysian by-law would oblige. What it supplies is the thing a tender cannot be written without: an outcome attached to each named position.
A required level for each named position
The building states what each position must achieve. The bidder works out the camera, the lens, the mounting height and the lighting that achieves it. Every proposal then answers the same question.
| Position in the building | Minimum level it calls for | What the recording must be good enough for |
|---|---|---|
| Main entrances and exits, frontal view of people entering and leaving | Identification | Who a person is — “beyond reasonable doubt”, in the standard’s words |
| Counters where a security check or visitor registration happens | Recognition | Whether the person is someone an operator has seen before |
| Common areas, lift lobbies, staircases and emergency exits | Observation | How many people are present, and what they are wearing |
| Vehicle entrance and exit, car park and loading bay | Number plate capture | The plate — its own camera, angle and usually lighting |
The Singapore standard uses the same four level names that IEC 62676-4 defines for camera design, but sets its own thresholds in millimetres per pixel, not the IEC’s pixels per metre — two scales that should not be read as one. Axis Communications reproduces the IEC definitions: at Observation an operator can determine how many people are present and see characteristic details such as distinctive clothing; at Recognition, whether an individual shown is the same as someone seen before; at Identification, it is possible to identify an individual. The Singapore document also cautions that a surveillance system “should not be designed to serve as the sole protective measure”.
Normalising three proposals onto one row structure
With the required outcomes written down, three quotations lie on one row structure. The rows are decisions the building has to settle whether or not anyone writes them down; the columns record what each proposal states, what it is silent about, and what must be added to complete it.
| What must be settled | What a quotation states | What it is silent about | The line that makes three comparable |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coverage | A camera count | Which position each camera serves | Assign every position a required level |
| Image quality | A resolution in megapixels | The lowest resolution in the chain | State the level each position must achieve, not the camera’s megapixels |
| Retention | A capacity in terabytes | Days, frame rate, recording mode | Fix quality, frame rate, mode and days |
| Cabling and containment | A lump sum for cabling | Route, containment, power at the far end | State the power guaranteed at the camera, not at the switch |
| Making good | Nothing, or “by others” | Who patches, and who carries a failed re-use | A site visit before pricing, and who makes good named |
| Documentation | “Manuals provided” | As-fitted drawings, credentials, commissioning | As-fitted drawings and a baseline of agreed views |
| Warranty | “One year” | When it starts, and what counts as finished | From practical completion, defined as fault-free days |
| Year two | Nothing, or a figure after signature | Whether spare parts sit inside the rate | Maintenance schedule with the tender; parts separately |
What the grid changes
It usually reorders the three in one sitting. A total that looked low because it carried no containment — the trunking and conduit the cable runs in — no making good, and no year-two figure climbs once those lines are priced.
A committee holding three quotations today does not need rates of its own to do this. Send the grid back to all three with the empty cells marked, ask each to price them by the same date, and see who declines. Neither contractor did anything wrong up to that point; only one of them was answering the building’s question. The trade words are set out in the glossary.
Documentation is settled by naming what is handed over. The CCTV Advisory Service’s model specification lists as-fitted wiring and schematic diagrams among the handover requirements, and the Singapore standard calls for the agreed camera views and image quality to be documented once the system is commissioned, then reviewed periodically with any deterioration rectified immediately — a duty it places on the building, not the contractor. Without that baseline nobody can later prove a system got worse. Applying the same discipline before the tender goes out is writing a scope of works.
What does “more megapixels” actually buy?
Less than the number implies. The Singapore standard notes that a Recognise requirement “can no longer be simply equated to a 50% screen height”, because megapixel cameras and high-resolution displays changed the relationship. It then states the point that undoes most sensor comparisons: the resolution being compared “reflects the lowest resolution in the chain”. A camera behind an over-compressed recorder delivers the recorder’s quality. The same document calls for a minimum camera resolution of HD 1080p, 1920x1080 pixels or equivalent.
The current edition of IEC 62676-4 renames and extends those levels to seven: Overview, Outline, Discern, Perceive, Characterize, Validate and Scrutinize, each defined by what an operator can determine, not by equipment. At Discern, in the reproduction Axis publishes, “it is possible to detect objects and their movements and identify persons, vehicles or animals”. The first three are grouped for outdoor perimeter and terrain protection at 20, 40 and 80 px/m.
A pixel density is readable without electronics: the figures assume that “an average human face has a width of 16 cm”, so px/m says how much of a face a camera resolves at a given distance. Axis is careful to add that this is “a simplified model of a complex reality” which guarantees nothing, since light direction, optics quality and compression all affect the result. A proposal stating a level per position can be argued with; one stating a sensor resolution cannot.
How many days, at what frame rate?
Whatever the building writes down, because nothing else fixes it. Four things set the size of the recorder: image quality, frame rate, recording mode and days of retention. The Home Office’s operational requirements manual states the trade-off plainly: better recorded picture quality and a higher frame rate come at the expense of retention on the same drive.
The Singapore standard settles two of those four outright, and image quality in the section above. It calls for one full set of recordings archived “for the past 31 days or more”, and for day-to-day recording at a minimum of 6 frames per second indoors, with a higher rate outdoors for slow-moving traffic.
Two further parameters are about resilience rather than sizing: at least 20% reserve recording media, hot-swappable, and support for at least a RAID 5 array so a failed disk can be replaced while recording continues. On power the same document is firmer than it is elsewhere — an uninterruptible supply with at least 30 minutes of backup capacity shall be provided.
The fourth hides. Motion-triggered recording can halve a storage line and lose the one frame that mattered, and it is almost never named. Redvision’s specification checklist treats continuous, motion-triggered and schedule-based modes as a decision the specifier makes, alongside a 30-31 day minimum retention and the choice between the H.264 and H.265 codecs. CCTV Importers Australia gives indicative sizing of 4-8TB per 8 cameras for 30-60 day office and commercial retention — indicative only, since it moves with resolution, frame rate and codec. What the cabling will carry is taken up in analogue versus IP CCTV.
Why a proposal that is cheap on cable is not cheap
Because the cheapness is usually an omission. The commercial building cabling standard puts the horizontal run at 90 metres, with the channel — the whole path including the patch leads at each end — adding connectors and a maximum of 10 metres of cords on top. In a tower that distance decides where an equipment room can sit and how many of them there have to be, and a bidder who has not walked the risers has not priced it.
Power over Ethernet carries the same trap in miniature. The Ethernet Alliance publishes the switch-port power for the eight PoE classes as 4, 7, 15.4, 30, 45, 60, 75 and 90 watts, and the power guaranteed at the device itself as 3.84, 6.49, 13, 25.5, 40, 51, 62 and 71.3 watts. The gap between the two rows is cable loss. A Class 8 port rated 90 W guarantees 71.3 W at the far end — which is why a pan-tilt-zoom camera or a heated housing can pass on the bench and brown out at the end of a long run.
Ratings, enclosures and spare capacity
Ingress and impact ratings are worth writing down because they are checkable on delivery. The Singapore standard sets IP65 as its floor for outdoor cameras exposed to weather and calls for cameras to be secured at a minimum height of 2 metres from floor level. Redvision’s checklist goes further outdoors, recommending IP66 for exposed positions and IK10 where vandalism is a risk; the Sebert Group testing laboratory publishes IK10 as 20 joules, a 5 kg hammer dropped 400 mm.
- N01The power guaranteed at the camera, not at the switch portSTATED
- N02Ingress and impact rating per position, and the run each cable assumesMEASURED
- N03An uninterruptible supply carrying the recordersPRICED
- N04Spare capacity in the design and in the recording mediaWRITTEN
- N05The interoperability standard the equipment must conform toNAMED
- N06Every item the proposal does not coverEXCLUDED
The same standard asks for a minimum of 20% spare capacity in the design. That is the line a bid sized to today’s camera count leaves out, and charges for at the first expansion.
What does the second year cost?
It separates three proposals more sharply than any other question, and is asked least often. A Malaysian answer exists in public: Iskandar Puteri City Council put maintenance of the closed-circuit television in its own buildings out to tender, with the scope written out line by line. It is a council tender rather than a condominium one, and its quantities and its money are its own — but the line items are real, and a committee can read them as a checklist.
| The line | What the Iskandar Puteri tender writes down | What to check yours says |
|---|---|---|
| Preventive scope | Camera cleaning, connection continuity checks, view angle adjustment and lens focus, to reduce downtime and repair cost | Is the scope itemised, or is it the words “regular maintenance”? |
| Head end | Network switch, recording console, fibre receiver and transmitter and equipment rack checked for condition, ventilation and secured power | Does the scope reach past the cameras to the recorder and the rack? |
| Camera housings | Domes, lenses, housing windows and the interior of camera housings cleaned | Is cleaning a named task, or a courtesy? |
| Operational check | Every camera checked on the display screen, with pan, tilt and zoom verified | Is there any test of what the cameras actually show? |
| Software | Management software reviewed for deficiencies, integrity verified, updated if necessary | Is software upkeep anybody’s obligation? |
| Spare parts | A separate provisional sum — RM50,000, at a council’s own scale | Do spare parts sit inside the monthly rate, or outside it? |
| Proof of service | Photographs of the work before, during and after | How would the building know a visit happened? |
| Insurance | Public liability and contractors’ all-risks policies provided | Are both policies named, and current? |
Spare parts, and the two dates on a warranty
The spare-parts mechanism is the thing worth copying, not the amount. Iskandar Puteri carries spare parts as a separate provisional sum, at RM50,000 across a council’s own portfolio of buildings — a figure a single condominium has to size for itself. What transplants is that the sum sits outside the monthly rate, so it is settled before anything fails rather than by whoever argues harder in month seven.
Two dates decide the warranty. The CCTV Advisory Service’s example runs twelve months “from the date of the issue of the Certificate of Practical Completion”, and defines practical completion as “fourteen consecutive days of uninterrupted, fault free operation”. A warranty starting at delivery rather than at a working system is a shorter one. The same guidance puts the full maintenance schedule in the installation tender, while the building still has leverage — what a maintenance contract should say.
Availability is a different promise from response. The Singapore standard says system availability should be set at 95% over a 12-month time frame, and that faults should be rectified within 24 hours. One Malaysian maintenance page found in this research, GTC’s CCTV Clinic, offers “24 hours response technical Support” and states no uptime target. One page is not a market, but it is worth checking whether the three in front of you do any better.
Which clauses put three proposals on one baseline?
A small number, issued to all three contractors at once, before any of them prices anything. None needs technical knowledge to write.
- A compliance statement. Each bidder confirms in writing that what is priced complies with the specification, and prices any variation separately.
- A site visit before pricing — the Iskandar Puteri tender advises bidders to survey the site first — and, as an addition of your own, a clause that anything not priced is deemed included elsewhere and must still be carried out.
- An attendance time on a reported fault, in hours or days — a number the building chooses.
- An availability target and a rectification deadline, which are different promises from a response time.
- A named interoperability standard, so somebody else can work on the system later.
- The maintenance schedule, submitted with the installation tender.
The third is worth dwelling on. The source template for it reads “within xx hours/days of the fault being reported” — the placeholder is verbatim, and that is the point. The buyer chooses the number, or nobody does.
Name the model, or name the outcome?
The first clause does most of the work. CCTV Information’s wording is that all tenderers must include a statement that the system proposed and priced complies with the specification, and that variations and suggestions for improvement “should be listed and priced separately”. That converts three divergent proposals into one comparable baseline plus three sets of priced options — a far more useful document than three totals, because the options can then be judged on their merits instead of buried in them.
The trade-off underneath is real. Naming make and model numbers makes three quotations directly comparable and, the same publisher observes, advantages whichever bidder has the best buying terms with that manufacturer when better terms may exist on an alternative make. On its own service page, which is a sales page, that publisher says it states the equipment down to the make and model number. A performance specification keeps pricing honest and puts the judgement of equivalence back on the committee.
The interoperability clause is the anti-lock-in one. The Singapore standard says network systems should comply with prevailing Open Network Video Interface Forum standards or equivalent; Redvision’s checklist names the three video profiles as T for streaming, G for edge storage and M for analytics and metadata. Without one named, the next contractor cannot touch the system.
Presenting the comparison to owners
Two things belong in the paper. The Strata Management Act 2013 nowhere defines “security services”, though section 23(3)(b) makes the expense of providing them a purpose of the maintenance account; it does not say whether equipment is covered or only manpower.
The limit is on term. A joint management body may not enter into any contract relating to maintenance and management “for any period exceeding twelve months”, so a three-year maintenance offer attached to an installation quotation is not something a JMB can sign. A management corporation is not under the same cap: section 21(3) sits in the part of the Act that governs joint management bodies only, and an MC rejecting a lawful longer offer throws away a term it could have taken. Which fund pays is taken up in the sinking fund or the maintenance fee.
A full-text search of the Act and the 2015 Regulations returns no spending threshold. The only control it puts on a joint management committee is section 22(1), which has it act “subject to any restriction imposed or direction given by the joint management body at a general meeting”. Whatever ceiling a committee believes it is under, its own owners imposed it. Conflicts of interest are a fair question to put to all three bidders: Law Hock Hua, adviser to the Strata Property Owners Association Selangor and Kuala Lumpur, has argued in The Star that a statutory declaration “should be made compulsory for all major contractors, including the staff of the property management company”.
What is the building actually buying?
Monitoring, on the evidence, rather than equipment. A systematic review of closed-circuit television evaluations found that in residential settings crime fell by approximately 12% against control areas, and that in the housing schemes it pooled separately the effect was non-significant. Across every setting it studied, not only residential ones, actively monitored schemes were associated with a significant reduction in crime, while passively monitored systems showed non-significant effects across all three of its meta-analyses.
Two limits travel with that. Nothing in the review is Malaysian, and none of it tests a high-rise condominium. And what it tests is monitoring style — active against passive — not maintenance. That maintenance matters too is our reasoning rather than the study’s finding: a system nobody services stops being watchable. Cameras nobody watches measure as doing very little, and a comparison that ranks three proposals on equipment alone is scoring what the evidence supports least.
Occhio Tec is an Extra Low Voltage systems contractor in Kuala Lumpur, established 2010, working mainly in mid-high to high-end condominiums in Mont Kiara, Bangsar and KLCC, and designing, installing and maintaining CCTV, access control, video intercom, structured networking and perimeter intrusion systems. It holds a Panasonic Malaysia Authorised Strategic Partner appointment for ELV works (2015), a MicroEngine Authorised System Installer appointment (2014) and an Astro Authorised Reseller appointment for IPTV and broadband (2016) — the kind of disclosure the make-and-model trade-off turns on. What a building needs specified depends on what each position has to achieve, which a site survey establishes. Related pieces are collected in Insights.