CCTV AMC and maintenance contracts

What an AMC actually covers

Contracts vary far more than the three letters suggest. These are the parts that decide whether yours is worth paying for.

• Scheduled preventive visits - lens cleaning, re-aiming, cable and connector checks, and a recorder health check. Most camera failures announce themselves weeks in advance if somebody looks.
• Fault response - a stated time to attend when something breaks between visits. This is the clause that matters most and the one most often left vague.
• Retention verification - confirming the recorder is still holding the number of days you were sold. Disks fill, settings drift, and a system can look healthy while keeping four days instead of thirty.
• Firmware and configuration - keeping recorders current, and re-applying settings after a power event or a disk swap.
• Parts and consumables - and whether they are included at all. See below, because this is where most disputes start.

Comprehensive or non-comprehensive

This single distinction explains almost every AMC argument we are asked to arbitrate. A non-comprehensive contract buys labour: the engineer attends, diagnoses and fits, but a failed camera, disk or power supply is billed separately. A comprehensive contract includes those parts, and costs more up front for it.

Neither is the right answer for every site. On newer installs still inside warranty, non-comprehensive is usually the honest choice, because you would be paying twice for the same cover. On a five-year-old plant system with disks past their rated hours, comprehensive is normally cheaper than the year you are about to have. What is never acceptable is not knowing which one you signed.

What to ask before you sign anything

Ask these of any vendor, including us. A contract that cannot answer them in writing is not a maintenance contract, it is a cleaning schedule.

• How many visits a year, and are they scheduled or on request?
• What is the fault response time, in hours or days, in writing?
• Who actually attends - an engineer who knows the site, or whoever is free?
• Which parts are included, and which are billed? Ask specifically about hard disks, power supplies and PoE switches.
• Is footage retention checked and reported at each visit?
• What is excluded? Physical damage, lightning, rodent-chewed cable and civil work are commonly out, which is fine, as long as you know.

Systems we take on

We hold AMCs on systems we installed, and on systems installed by somebody else after an inspection. Taking over an unfamiliar install is normal work: we document what is there, test every camera and channel, and tell you what condition it is genuinely in before either of us signs. Occasionally that inspection ends with us advising against a contract, because the hardware will not survive the year and covering it would just move the argument to month seven.

Cover is not limited to cameras. Boom barriers, access control, video door phones and attendance systems all have moving parts, consumables and drift, and all of them fail quietly in the same way.

Most failures are silent - the seven checks that find them take ten minutes and need no tools.

In this climate the highest-value visit of the year is the pre-monsoon one - what fails in the rains, and why.

Curious what a proper society AMC should actually include? Here is what most contracts leave out.

How often should a system actually be serviced? It depends on your site, not a fixed number.

Where we service

Global Eye Security Systems is based in Dombivli East and services across all of Mumbai, including Dombivli, Kalyan, Thane, Navi Mumbai, Taloja MIDC and Mahape. For a maintenance contract this matters more than it does for an installation: a response commitment is only as real as the distance behind it.