Protectron consolidates Ottawa centrals

OTTAWA - National security firm Protectron has wrapped up a major move of its central station to a larger facility here, giving the company an opportunity to upgrade its technology and more breathing room to expand. With the purchase of the Canadian division of Protection One last July, Protectron found itself with two central stations in the same city, the former Protection One monitoring facility and the central station that houses Security 24, Protectron’s contract monitoring arm, said Daniel Demers, president of Protectron. Now, the two operations have merged and are housed in the 14,000 square-foot building that once belonged to Protection One Canada. It now also houses Protectron’s Ottawa-based sales and installation staff. The transfer of accounts to the new central station was completed in early April. “With the Protection One acquisition, we found ourselves acquiring even more wholesale accounts,” Demers said. “There will be other acquisitions too, so we needed a lot of room for expansion.” Protectron also used the move to the new facility to unify the company’s different monitoring platforms. While Security 24 had been converted to Protectron’s platform several years ago, the former Protection One operations used SIMS. All Protectron’s monitoring operations use IBS software. Once renovations to the building are complete, the location will house about 55-60 Protectron employees, said John Pistilli, Protectron’s vice president of operations for central and western Canada. The central station alone will have the capacity for 35 workstations, which the company will work to fill as its account base grows goal of 100,000 accounts. “The advantage will be that the whole operation will operate from one site,” Pistilli said. “I had people in four different sites at one time.” With the first stage of the renovation project, the central station, complete, the company will next focus on the remainder of the second floor, where central station customer service and technical dispatch personnel are located. The first floor, which houses human resources, accounting and other administrative staff, is the final phase of the project, which cost the company about $400,000 to $500,000, although the company derived about $1 million in cost savings from the consolidation. Physical changes to the building are expected to be complete in mid-June.