Latest / Event Industry News Podcast / Inside Event Security: How Screening Tech Is Changing Festivals & Stadiums

Transcript

Inside Event Security: How Screening Tech Is Changing Festivals & Stadiums · Event Industry News Podcast

• 0:00
  The Event Industry News Podcast is sponsored by Prezent Communications.
• 0:04
  Prezent provides broadcast-quality live, hybrid, and virtual
• 0:08
  event production trusted by organizations where reliability really matters.
• 0:13
  From corporate town halls and conferences to high-profile
• 0:17
  live streams, they design and deliver fully resilient systems
• 0:20
  that work first time.
• 0:27
  Hello everybody, welcome along to the Event Industry News Podcast
• 0:31
  with me, James Dixon, wishing you all a very good morning, afternoon, or evening,
• 0:34
  wherever or whenever you join today's podcast from.
• 0:38
  And on today's podcast, talking all things security,
• 0:42
  my guest today is the first time, a first-time guest on the podcast
• 0:46
  and a company that I must admit before today's recording I wasn't familiar
• 0:50
  with. So as always on the podcast, we hope to find out a little bit
• 0:53
  more about both our guest and our company before we get into the conversation
• 0:57
  about event security, how it's evolved, where it
• 1:01
  stands at the moment, how technology indeed is probably shaping the security
• 1:05
  that we deploy at our events, and probably more
• 1:09
  besides that. So I'm delighted to say that joining the podcast for the first time
• 1:13
  is the Business Support Director for Detectnology UK,
• 1:17
  Mia Moles. Mia, a very good morning to you. Welcome to the podcast.
• 1:20
  Morning. Um, did I say that correctly? Deteknoloji?
• 1:24
  Yes, we hear a lot of funny versions. That was quite tame,
• 1:28
  actually. Okay, yeah, I know, I bet, I bet.
• 1:31
  It seems obvious, but I think I said to her, not— it's not always,
• 1:34
  you know, you— we've had so many, so many different
• 1:38
  company names and things on here that I think, oh, that's how to pronounce it,
• 1:40
  and I'm wildly wrong. So Deteknoloji UK, let's find out a
• 1:44
  little bit more about you first of all, Mia, if we can. Tell us a
• 1:47
  little bit about yourself, what you do, um, in the company. Of course.
• 1:51
  So business support director probably isn't a very typical role.
• 1:55
  It's one that we adapted more for an American structure, which basically
• 2:00
  gives me the access to all different arms of the company. So I dip
• 2:04
  my finger in sales a little bit, more heavily so in operations. I'm kind of
• 2:07
  aware of the financial goings-on, but it's not my core responsibility.
• 2:11
  And yeah, just looking to improve the business in any way we can, whether it
• 2:15
  be processes, product offerings, customer service, trying to
• 2:20
  make sure everything runs smoothly and kind of the tie that pulls it together,
• 2:23
  if you will. Yeah, but more and more companies, we're seeing more and more
• 2:27
  of these roles, aren't we? Just before we get into the actual company, but,
• 2:29
  you know, people who really have an idea of what's happening in every single department
• 2:33
  because you need to have that overview as a business. You need to be able
• 2:36
  to see what's, what's happening and all those different aspects really pull it together.
• 2:39
  So let's get into the technology and what the company actually does.
• 2:43
  So we provide security screening equipment, and it's that simple. We provide
• 2:48
  only the hardware, the technology. We don't get involved with the operators.
• 2:52
  We would always recommend that be somebody separate for validity
• 2:56
  purposes as much as anything. So we provide screening solutions for people,
• 2:59
  bags, vehicles, explosive and narcotics, whatever it
• 3:03
  is that you're looking to find. If you're willing to use technology to do it,
• 3:06
  9 times out of 10, we'll have a product that will help you.
• 3:10
  And, and how long is— I'm curious to know how long the company has actually
• 3:13
  been in existence and how this correlates maybe with developments over the
• 3:17
  last couple of decades. Of course, about 36 years now. I think we're
• 3:21
  about to go into our 37th, um, with the name change along the
• 3:24
  way. So we've been D-Technology since 2013. Fun plan was
• 3:28
  their detection technology, get it together, and you get D-Technology.
• 3:32
  Um, so our founder saw a lot of screening equipment when he was
• 3:35
  living out in the US And this is, you know, pre-7/7,
• 3:39
  pre-9/11. It was not something that we really had in the UK so heavily,
• 3:44
  pretty much just at airports. And even then, you can't compare what we see in
• 3:48
  an airport today versus what we saw in an airport, you know, almost 40 years
• 3:51
  ago. Absolutely. Um, so personal circumstances
• 3:55
  meant that he moved back to the UK from the US and found
• 3:59
  himself in a bit of a rut and kind of didn't know what the direction
• 4:01
  of his life was going to be, didn't know what to do, and was reading
• 4:04
  a newspaper and saw that there'd been a threat on a nightclub and thought,
• 4:07
  I know what could help this, this technology that we saw in America.
• 4:11
  So he reached out to the gentleman that was in charge of it over there
• 4:14
  that he'd met whilst living out there and said, I need to buy a machine.
• 4:18
  And, uh, at the time these machines are very heavy,
• 4:21
  very tall, and he had it over the sofa in his living room.
• 4:25
  Yeah. And, uh, just bought one and used to rent a Luton van, driving it
• 4:29
  around trying to— well, I love that.
• 4:32
  Starts— and when he's, you know, it's interesting that you say proved that it
• 4:36
  was needed because it's always— I don't know if chicken
• 4:40
  and egg is the right sort of phrase to use, but, um,
• 4:43
  you know, questions often asking, are we in, you know,
• 4:47
  are there more security threats now than there were 36
• 4:52
  years ago, or are we just more aware of them? You know,
• 4:55
  uh, is our awareness changed? Has the threat level gone
• 4:58
  up. And it's probably a combination of all those things, I guess, that,
• 5:02
  that contribute to attitudes towards security today, particularly in events.
• 5:07
  Yeah, I think the truth somewhere is in the middle. Ironically enough, one of the
• 5:10
  first customers of this company was a large nightclub chain. Um,
• 5:14
  they accepted the need for these items before courts.
• 5:18
  The courts were the next client that we onboarded, but we had nightclubs first.
• 5:22
  And when I say we the company rather than myself. I wasn't here back then.
• 5:26
  Um, but it's, it's a mixture of things. It's— there is more
• 5:30
  threats, and there's a lot of more kind of people who will act
• 5:34
  as lone wolves now. They don't need dependence on numbers like they used to years
• 5:37
  ago. And without going too much into it, there's many ways
• 5:40
  nowadays with the evolution of technology in general to find out how to
• 5:44
  do things that you wouldn't have been available to the average person on the street
• 5:48
  40 years ago. Well, of course, yeah, that's an
• 5:52
  important point to make when, when you're, you know, addressing security
• 5:56
  and risk, uh, you know, risk of threat and,
• 5:59
  and all the rest of it, is that, you know, our ideologies,
• 6:02
  you know, have, have changed and developed. But,
• 6:06
  you know, arguably some ideologies have always been there,
• 6:09
  but people's access to information and how to act
• 6:13
  on a particular instinct has changed significantly,
• 6:16
  hasn't it? So you're quite right to highlight that because that's where threat levels change
• 6:20
  is people's ability to act on, on things. Um,
• 6:24
  so go on, sorry. No, I was saying exactly,
• 6:27
  and in the same token, we're more aware of it now because we have access
• 6:31
  to those same means. So it really is, as you say, chicken egg's
• 6:34
  probably a good term. It's 6 of one, half a dozen of the other.
• 6:37
  Is it going on more? Perhaps. Is it because ideologies have
• 6:41
  changed? Probably not really. People just used to be comfortable to have those ideologies in
• 6:45
  their living room with the door closed, and now they can have them on Twitter,
• 6:49
  which sparks other things. For the same token, we hear about everything
• 6:52
  that happens because there's a constant news cycle, you know, worldwide that everybody
• 6:56
  has access to. When it comes to the actual hardware itself,
• 7:00
  I, I mean, one of the things that I was keen to ask this morning
• 7:03
  straight away is sort of one of the first things was how much of it
• 7:06
  is about detecting potential
• 7:11
  threats. So, you know, you, you said you deal with the hardware, so it's,
• 7:13
  it's scanning equipment bags, scanning people, scanning, you know, identifying are they carrying objects
• 7:17
  that they shouldn't be carrying Um, you know, knife crime
• 7:21
  is huge. We have to sort of— we can't sort of skirt around that.
• 7:24
  Knife crime is an issue. It's, it's been a growing issue for the last few
• 7:28
  decades in this country. So no doubt some of the hardware that you're providing is,
• 7:31
  is looking to, um, to detect, you know, elements and
• 7:36
  objects like that. But how much of it is also a deterrent, a visual
• 7:40
  deterrent to stop people rather than actually catching them with those items?
• 7:43
  How much of deployment of your type of hardware in any circumstance,
• 7:47
  but particularly events it is about giving that visual deterrent to people
• 7:51
  to say, look, we've got these things in place, so don't
• 7:55
  even think about it. That's totally up to the organizer or
• 7:59
  the venue, because the equipment, the technology exists now that if you wanted to,
• 8:03
  you could have it on a very high level of sensitivity and detect everything,
• 8:07
  right? Not many people do that. There's not many environments where that's needed.
• 8:11
  You know, you don't need to feel like you're going to an airport to go
• 8:14
  to a concert. There's environments where it's totally necessary and they deploy it in that
• 8:17
  way, but this is the same equipment. You can change sensitivities on
• 8:21
  the same pieces of equipment. We've had clients say, I don't
• 8:25
  care if it alarms on everybody, I want to search everybody, I need to see
• 8:28
  what happens. And we've had clients say, I actually want to go
• 8:31
  for this older piece of kit because people are more used to seeing it,
• 8:34
  and seeing these old-fashioned mag arches, a line of them in front
• 8:38
  of my venue, acts as security theatre, and that's enough for me. Me. So it
• 8:42
  totally— theater, that's a great— that's a— that's a new— I've not
• 8:45
  heard that term before, security theater. So we worked with a venue
• 8:49
  that was, uh, it's quite a new-built venue, and the head of
• 8:52
  security there, one of his main— and he's a very well-respected
• 8:56
  gentleman in the industry, he knows about all of the emerging technologies, and he was
• 8:59
  very clear, I'm going for, you know, what was groundbreaking 10
• 9:03
  years ago because I want to see— I want people to see,
• 9:06
  recognize that it's screening And you often find
• 9:10
  that when people see that, they'll go to the bush and throw their knife away,
• 9:12
  and you never get to that point of confrontation at the door, at the perimeter.
• 9:16
  Your security staff never have the sometimes awkward,
• 9:19
  uncomfortable, and unsafe interaction of removing a knife from somebody.
• 9:23
  There's lots of different ways to run security these days, and that's
• 9:28
  an ever-growing popular way to do it now is with security theatre.
• 9:32
  When the team at Deteknoloji are talking to new clients,
• 9:35
  how many of them are not aware of what you've just said, that there are
• 9:38
  actually different levels that you can actually set certain pieces of hardware?
• 9:42
  How many of them think that basically you just turn it on and it will
• 9:45
  do its job? About 15%.
• 9:50
  And I say that because our business is quite evenly split. 50%,
• 9:53
  uh, 30% sales, so permanent deployments,
• 9:57
  30%-ish maintenance.
• 10:00
  And that will be in any kind— anywhere that you see this equipment, um,
• 10:04
  we most likely maintain it. So we do preventative maintenance and remedial works on
• 10:08
  it. And then you have 30%, which is the hire market, the short-term hires for
• 10:11
  events. And of that market, I'd say about half, so 15%
• 10:15
  of the overall business, are unaware of the capabilities of this screening equipment.
• 10:19
  You've got some people that have been in the industry for a long time and
• 10:21
  worked on your bigger events that have had to have security for many years now.
• 10:25
  And then you've got people last year, particularly this year, and definitely
• 10:29
  from next year, who've never had to worry about security that will now
• 10:33
  need to due to different changes in regulations. And it doesn't mean they have to
• 10:36
  deploy technology because they don't— nowhere in Martin's Law does it state, and it's
• 10:40
  important to be clear on that, that you have to have screening technology. There's a
• 10:43
  lot of people spreading misinformation on LinkedIn or calling themselves experts. It's not necessary.
• 10:48
  The only thing that they're going to state is necessary is
• 10:52
  to search, and one way to do that efficiently and
• 10:55
  whilst maintaining guest experience is to use technology. There is other ways
• 10:59
  to do that too. And, and, and something
• 11:02
  that has popped into my head again, just from what you've explained,
• 11:07
  are there— you talked about security theater and having solutions
• 11:11
  that, you know, traditional archways, you know, big visible things that people
• 11:15
  know, all right, that is a security archway and I'm going to get scanned,
• 11:17
  I'm going to go through that. Are there now covert options as
• 11:21
  well? Can— is it— is there hardware that can be deployed where people don't even
• 11:24
  realize they're walking through it? Exactly. So our new kind of— the
• 11:29
  new mass threat detection systems in the industry at the moment mean you can just
• 11:32
  walk free-flowing, 2 people together, mother and child.
• 11:36
  You don't have to stop and go one by one, um, and you wouldn't know
• 11:39
  you're being screened. You can keep small bags on you. They even make x-rays
• 11:42
  that you can put your bag on now that the belt goes the same speed
• 11:46
  as you walk and you grab it on the other end and you'll never— in
• 11:49
  that case, you know you'll put it on an x-ray, but, um, you'll only ever
• 11:52
  be stopped if it finds something. And that's not an operator sat doing that,
• 11:56
  that's now AI because the industry is constantly changing.
• 11:59
  You obviously then use an operator for secondary search. It just means that
• 12:03
  when they're looking, they have a better idea of where to look.
• 12:07
  And because we're all human, inevitably we get tired,
• 12:11
  things get missed, particularly sometimes in this industry with late night work and
• 12:15
  pressure and days and everyone coming to the gate at the same time. It kind
• 12:18
  of just adds a layer of reliability because,
• 12:21
  you know, as the strongest part of every security system is the people,
• 12:25
  we are also the weakest part. Interesting. Yeah,
• 12:28
  you, you mentioned AI there, and when it comes to sort of linking
• 12:32
  people and the technology and the hardware together, you know, when I think about,
• 12:36
  you know, events, you know, events will always— most
• 12:40
  events will have some sort of ticketing process. If it's a public event, a concert,
• 12:43
  live music event, there'll be a ticketing process. If it's a, a big trade
• 12:47
  show, you know, a business convention, something like that, there'll be a registration system
• 12:51
  in place where you collect your badge, you have to have a badge to enter.
• 12:53
  So you've kind of got these ticketing/registration systems
• 12:57
  depending on the nature of the event. How integrated
• 13:01
  now is the technology, the hardware technology that you would deal
• 13:04
  with, with things like ticketing technology, with badging technology?
• 13:08
  What are the difficulties in terms of linking up these sort of different systems nowadays?
• 13:13
  There are manufacturers that are trying to get there. I've not
• 13:16
  seen anything in real life in this country yet that achieves that.
• 13:20
  Right. Um, what we can achieve is we work with
• 13:24
  a particularly large festival organization
• 13:27
  group. They put on multiple festivals every year and they give away tickets
• 13:31
  on the radio and they upgrade people's tickets. And before deploying our technology, they never
• 13:35
  had a way to confidently say X amount of people entered the venue
• 13:39
  because people were scanning tickets twice. The ticket got upgraded on the door. Is that
• 13:43
  2 people? Is that 1? What our equipment can do is, while screening you,
• 13:47
  count out footfall. Right, so you get that accurate idea
• 13:51
  of how many people actually passed the threshold, each machine, how many people got
• 13:54
  in. And then from that you can see trends. What was the busiest
• 13:57
  hour for ingress? When did most people leave? You can
• 14:01
  get all of these other metrics that then help with the general kind of running
• 14:05
  of the festival. Um, getting people in quickly,
• 14:10
  they are a lot happier. The first experience is nice.
• 14:13
  And on venues where we've deployed that technology, their bar spend has gone up.
• 14:16
  For example, you know, it's different, different ways to
• 14:20
  measure. I'd never considered that the security elements of
• 14:24
  the hardware could actually be utilized at that. And of course, it makes complete
• 14:28
  sense when you explain it like you just have done. But, you know, I guess
• 14:32
  what you say, irrespective of ticket, even from a product,
• 14:35
  even the production entrances for crew, for staff, for people who
• 14:39
  are working on site, if everybody's got to pass through some form of security screening
• 14:43
  to get on site, then irrespective of who you are, what your ticket says,
• 14:46
  what your badge says, what your wristband says. You're just— you
• 14:50
  can't— you can count physical bodies in. Exactly.
• 14:53
  And more so now, we are seeing the security perimeter
• 14:58
  be established days before setup commences, and our equipment is then typically
• 15:02
  the first thing to go in, also with sporting events. And then they screen every
• 15:07
  member of staff for build and break for that site, and it keeps the site
• 15:10
  secure because you set up a perimeter if your festival's in a park But
• 15:14
  then think how many people come and go to set up the stage, microphone boxes,
• 15:17
  all these different things. There could be a breach.
• 15:21
  And, you know, again, many years ago that wasn't something people had to worry about,
• 15:24
  but the reality of where we are today is— is every festival at
• 15:28
  risk? No. Is the country,
• 15:32
  the world, in a constant state of knowing there is going to
• 15:36
  be an incident, an attack, whatever you want to call it, and not knowing
• 15:40
  when? Yes. We've always been that way, we just talk about it more
• 15:44
  now. And I think we've seen so many incidents recently, particularly in this country,
• 15:48
  and access to knives has, you know, there's been an ongoing issue around
• 15:52
  how people can access knives so easily, underage people. There's— it's highly publicized,
• 15:56
  and I think the government has rightfully so decided that it's time to put some
• 16:01
  kind of regulation in place to ensure that people can feel
• 16:04
  safe, because that's a lot of it as well. You want to go somewhere,
• 16:07
  you want to feel safe. Yeah.
• 16:11
  Does the technology detect contraband as well? When I say contraband, I mean,
• 16:14
  you know, obviously we've spoken, we've used the word knife
• 16:18
  on here a few times now about detecting objects and, you know, weapons and things
• 16:22
  like that. Does the hardware actually detect things like drugs?
• 16:26
  The ones you walk through yourself? No, that's a secondary
• 16:31
  screening level. So we have that equipment Um,
• 16:34
  we've only seen really this year we've had interest from festivals about
• 16:38
  deploying that, I think, where they predict they're going to particularly have issues.
• 16:42
  Um, what we've seen a lot of people do is have dogs. If the dogs
• 16:45
  identify a person, they'll then use our equipment to confirm
• 16:49
  the presence of contraband, narcotics, whatever it might be.
• 16:53
  But we don't have access to, that I'm aware of in this country,
• 16:57
  anything that you can walk through and it will detect drugs on you.
• 17:01
  Okay, that's interesting. So tell me about statistically,
• 17:05
  you've already mentioned that the hardware that you deploy on event
• 17:09
  sites can be used for generating all sorts of metrics, you know, not least counting
• 17:13
  people on site. But taking it back to the actual
• 17:16
  subject of security, in the last decade, for example,
• 17:20
  have you seen statistically your hardware detecting, are there
• 17:24
  more logged incidents uh, at events that you have got
• 17:28
  hardware deployed at where they have detected weapons,
• 17:32
  objects, things that have been confiscated from people? Uh, you know,
• 17:36
  is that statistically something you can see a trend of?
• 17:39
  Yes. So out of all the hardware we offer, only 2 of the
• 17:43
  types of equipment machinery have a process where after screening,
• 17:48
  the security officer selects what has been found
• 17:51
  on the person or if it was a random alarm.
• 17:55
  That's uploaded to a database and then security officers
• 17:59
  and analysts look at that to see how they can improve the machine.
• 18:02
  But other pieces of equipment like your standard x-rays and archways, we would never know.
• 18:06
  We have feedback from clients that it's good, but as we're not always on
• 18:10
  site for the events, it's quite hard to say. What I can say from personal
• 18:14
  experience is I've been to a lot of trials at Premier League football clubs,
• 18:18
  at events, be it sporting or music,
• 18:22
  and we've seen the presence of our
• 18:26
  machinery leading to people disregarding items before they even get to the perimeter.
• 18:31
  We, when we're doing a trial, will always have kind of a box, our version
• 18:36
  of an amnesty box if you will, where you can surrender the item before it
• 18:39
  gets to the point that you would be screened. I know some events have that
• 18:42
  as well, but we see a difference. Whether it's across
• 18:46
  every event, it's hard to say without being there, and I definitely can't give a
• 18:49
  reliable statistic on that. No, sure, sure. Um, in terms
• 18:53
  of sort of the public perception side of things, I appreciate that you're not the
• 18:56
  organizer, and an organizer ultimately is going to know their,
• 18:59
  their audience. But as a company who are working in this industry,
• 19:03
  how do you, do you perceive the public's interpretation
• 19:08
  of, of security when they're going through airports,
• 19:11
  into football stadiums, into sports arenas, into concerts,
• 19:14
  into events. Um, are we becoming
• 19:18
  more accustomed to this, and are we generally happy that this is happening now
• 19:22
  because we feel safer? Or do you see sort of public— have you experienced
• 19:26
  or seen public pushback from this, saying, why do we need all of this?
• 19:30
  What's, what's kind of your own feeling about it as a company working in that
• 19:33
  sector? People are becoming more and more accustomed to it, and actually they
• 19:37
  from what we see, they expect it. Um, I know I expect
• 19:41
  it when I go to a festival, when I buy a ticket and I want
• 19:45
  to go and see live music. I expect it. And if I don't go through
• 19:47
  security, I feel on edge. Now, I'm slightly different. I'm probably slightly more paranoid.
• 19:51
  I see a lot of this world that maybe the general public don't. But even
• 19:54
  going with friends and family, people expect to see
• 19:58
  it now. And, um, interestingly, we recently ran some polls on LinkedIn because we were
• 20:02
  curious as to what the feedback would be on our company page, and quite
• 20:06
  a few people seem to agree. I think people would find it extremely
• 20:09
  tedious if we had, you know, aviation-level security at every festival.
• 20:13
  But yeah, I think there should
• 20:17
  be proportionate security for the event, and I think most of the general public would
• 20:20
  agree. Yeah, and I think it comes back to sort of, you know,
• 20:24
  a common sort of way of thinking, which is if you've got nothing to hide,
• 20:27
  why would you be worried about it? You know, personally,
• 20:30
  if I'm going somewhere and I have to go through any form of security process
• 20:34
  then I think, great, they're working hard to,
• 20:37
  to keep me safe, and I've got nothing to hide, so I'm
• 20:40
  more than happy to participate. And so I,
• 20:43
  I'm always curious about people who sort of push back against this, and,
• 20:47
  um, you know, have they got something to hide? If you've got— if you
• 20:51
  think it's sort of, you know, reducing your freedom
• 20:55
  somehow, um, I'm, I'm not quite sure how to interpret
• 20:59
  people who think along those routes, because, you know, inevitably we live in a world
• 21:03
  where people— some certain people do want to cause other people harm,
• 21:06
  um, whether that's on a mass scale or a one-to-one scale.
• 21:09
  So anything that kind of helps us be a little bit safer,
• 21:12
  my own inclination is that I'm happy to participate. And, um,
• 21:16
  yeah, I, I'm curious to sort of observe people when they're going through stuff like
• 21:20
  this and, and see how they take it. Yeah, I totally agree.
• 21:23
  And I think what people don't realize is that a lot of these larger events,
• 21:28
  there are con ops going on and there are trained security officers
• 21:31
  watching how people react to the machines before they even go through it. Because as
• 21:34
  you say, that's a massive part of it. And that's why it's so important
• 21:38
  to understand if you're running or organizing any kind of event,
• 21:43
  this technology isn't your be-all and end-all. It needs to be integrated
• 21:47
  with good policies and procedures, a good team, you know, other measures.
• 21:51
  It shouldn't just be, oh, well, we've got some archways on the door, there's no
• 21:54
  knives in, we're fine. No, you know, you should still have people walking around,
• 21:57
  boots on the ground observing. You still need to have your showstop procedures. You still
• 22:01
  need to have all of these other things in place. It's not— I
• 22:04
  think for a long time people looked at perimeter security
• 22:08
  as very isolated, and it's not. And it works best, and the people
• 22:12
  have— with the strongest security have it all integrated together. There's different layers.
• 22:17
  And I think people— what we most commonly see, people don't
• 22:20
  like machines where there's visible cameras because what they don't want is
• 22:24
  their image being taken, or, you know. But there's very strict
• 22:28
  government guidance around GDPR. These machines
• 22:32
  are automated to only hold images if the unit has alarmed, which can
• 22:36
  be cleared by the operator who searches you if there's nothing on you. And only
• 22:40
  at the point where you had something particularly dangerous would this image be shared
• 22:44
  with the control room, and the control room then have to make the decision if
• 22:47
  they want to share it with law enforcement. But that is no different to CCTV,
• 22:52
  which by the way is on most of the public streets in London.
• 22:56
  So exactly, exactly. We're surrounded by
• 22:59
  it, aren't we? And it's what you've just said there, and the way that you
• 23:03
  phrased it suggests to me that as a business you have to stay,
• 23:08
  you know, intrinsically up to date to the absolute second.
• 23:12
  You must be checking this. You must have people in the business who are checking
• 23:15
  legislation, guidance, GDPR regulations,
• 23:18
  sort of almost on a daily, I dare say weekly basis, to make sure that
• 23:23
  you can then offer that advice and guidance back to your own clients. You must
• 23:27
  have to stay completely up to date with it in order to retain viability
• 23:30
  within the industry. 100%. And it's a massive— here, that sits under
• 23:34
  our ops team. It's a massive part of what they do. So the same people
• 23:37
  that are scheduling these works and arranging delivery of
• 23:40
  these machines, before they even get to the stage of booking a vehicle
• 23:44
  and having it delivered, know that it's fully compliant, know that
• 23:47
  there's going to be no kind of issues with legality or anything like that.
• 23:53
  Is there, is there any sort of training or guidance that
• 23:57
  is deployed by your team to event organizers, for example? Because I'm
• 24:01
  guessing that people may stop and ask questions about this when they're going into
• 24:05
  any given location, whether that's a sports stadium or,
• 24:09
  you know, a festival, whatever it may be. If the public are going to ask
• 24:12
  questions, what they want is to be able to give some sort
• 24:16
  of response. So is— are there briefings? What— how do your team brief the
• 24:21
  clients? Of course. So somebody engages
• 24:24
  with us, they either know what they want or they have no idea what they
• 24:27
  want, and it's normally that polar of opposites. Okay.
• 24:31
  Either way, whatever it is, we first of all will have a call with them,
• 24:35
  really get to understand what they need if it's our first time working with them.
• 24:38
  And if they've not seen the equipment we're suggesting, we always invite them down
• 24:42
  to our warehouses to see it. So we've got a demo room in our Midlands
• 24:44
  warehouse in Stratford-upon-Avon. We have got one of every piece of equipment
• 24:48
  ready to go at all times. Come down, bring what you're looking to find.
• 24:52
  We encourage you to test it, you know, bring the items that you expect
• 24:57
  to be an issue on your site, or if it's not your first year,
• 24:58
  know are an issue on your site, and let's find them. And as part of
• 25:01
  that, we will really explain to those people in the room
• 25:05
  how this works. We have to be quite careful because it's not something we
• 25:09
  can, you know, put on a website or on LinkedIn because you don't want that
• 25:12
  information falling into the hands of the wrong people. Absolutely. Because to understand the
• 25:15
  machine's benefits, you also know its weaknesses, and every machine has weaknesses. And if people
• 25:19
  don't tell that, they're lying to you. Yeah. But they can come here, they can
• 25:22
  see what it can do for themselves, see what else we have, because it might
• 25:25
  be that they have their heart set on something, but we know something else would
• 25:27
  work better. So we'll show them that. That's why it's particularly important for
• 25:32
  us as a company to work independent to any manufacturer, because I
• 25:36
  think sometimes manufacturers want their product to fit and they kind
• 25:39
  of make it fit. And, you know, with security, you cannot put a square peg
• 25:43
  in a round hole. What you are looking for depends on,
• 25:46
  you know, that's the crucial thing, and that dictates what security system you have,
• 25:50
  not the other way around, or it should. So they come here, they see all
• 25:53
  of those things, and then once we deliver the equipment to site, if it gets
• 25:57
  to that stage, we always send down trained engineers that do a handover. We recommend
• 26:01
  for your kind of head of security to be there for that, but if not,
• 26:04
  send down a supervisor, send down someone that's going to be using it. And our
• 26:07
  engineers do not leave the site until we have explained our side.
• 26:10
  We'll never tell you what to look for. Because that is operating the system and
• 26:14
  that's different. But we will tell you how the machine works. We'll tell you kind
• 26:18
  of with the equipment that takes photographs how that works, because there's often questions around
• 26:21
  that. And we have LMS platforms for
• 26:25
  anybody that has an approved, pre-approved email address that can
• 26:30
  go on there and have access to all of that information before delivery and also
• 26:33
  while the event is live. And how closely do you work? I mean,
• 26:36
  there are a handful, you know, I'll not name their names, but people know who
• 26:40
  they are. There's a handful of really sort of well-known companies within the events
• 26:45
  industry in the UK who are very visible at sports stadiums,
• 26:48
  at festivals, at concerts, etc., etc. Um, there's a handful
• 26:52
  of companies. Do you work, or have you worked closely with
• 26:57
  them to actually work with their management and their supervisors so that if you're
• 27:01
  going to be present at several events that they're going to be working at,
• 27:03
  or several locations that they're working at, do you work directly with those security
• 27:07
  teams as well? Yeah. So particularly 2 of them we work extremely closely
• 27:11
  with. We work with others, but 2 of the major ones we work very closely
• 27:15
  with. And a lot of the time, before they even get to a point of
• 27:18
  bidding for said event, will come to us and see what would be a good
• 27:21
  fit. And they have people fully trained in our equipment. They've had people
• 27:25
  come to our offices and do refreshers with our team, and they are, you know,
• 27:28
  they know what they're doing. It's fascinating,
• 27:32
  like you said, this multi-layered approach now, you know, that events
• 27:37
  are complicated machines, particularly, you know, the bigger end of things, and it
• 27:40
  could be so easy to sort of deploy this technology and
• 27:45
  it be sort of quite fragmented and people within organizations and within
• 27:50
  organizing communities not being fully aware of it.
• 27:52
  So it's great to hear that, you know, you're obviously working directly with those
• 27:57
  security companies and people who are actually delivering that. One final
• 28:01
  thing to sort of ask is from a budgetary point of view,
• 28:04
  again, is one thing that we've not really touched on today, but you mentioned
• 28:08
  about the warehouse and people being able to come down and see the equipment firsthand
• 28:12
  and see, you know, what certain bits of hardware do and what
• 28:15
  others can do. You know, how easy
• 28:19
  is it to work with clients from a budgetary point of view? Because inevitably
• 28:23
  this equipment costs. Over the last decade or so, you've probably
• 28:26
  worked with a lot of new festivals, live events
• 28:30
  um, you know, organizers who maybe haven't deployed this type of
• 28:34
  hardware before, who then have to— they know that they need it, they know that
• 28:37
  they— it's an important part of their organizational aspect,
• 28:41
  but they obviously have to factor that into their budgets. Um,
• 28:44
  how sort of important a process is that, that you are able to offer things
• 28:48
  at varying levels for clients? It's critical.
• 28:51
  And for any business to grow in this day and age, I think regardless of
• 28:55
  what industry you're in, that's critical. We typically are
• 28:59
  very proud of the fact that we are a premium company, we offer a premium
• 29:02
  service, but by that we mean the customer service, the engineers,
• 29:06
  the amount of times we can do a first fix on site, the fact that
• 29:09
  we will not allow equipment to be delivered without a technical handover
• 29:12
  from an engineer. That's where we're premium. It's not in terms of price.
• 29:16
  And whatever your budget is, it is more important to
• 29:20
  us, and I feel we have a responsibility you know,
• 29:23
  as citizens, as people that like to attend events, as people in this country full
• 29:27
  stop, to ensure that we can find something to make work. Because if any organizer
• 29:31
  is coming to us and they have already got that intention to implement
• 29:36
  security, we never want it to be
• 29:39
  the security company that stops that from happening. It's true, you know.
• 29:43
  No, it can't be that. We've, um, we've been talking today on the podcast
• 29:48
  to Mia Moles, the Business Support Director for DeTechnology UK,
• 29:51
  talking about modern-day security deployment,
• 29:54
  hardware deployment particularly on event sites, how that's evolved over
• 29:58
  the 36 years of them being in business.
• 30:01
  Um, Mia, before we wrap up today's podcast, tell us,
• 30:04
  uh, if people want to find out a little bit more about what you guys
• 30:07
  do, where do they need to go and how do they do that? Of course,
• 30:10
  so our full product listing is available on our website, that's www.dtechnology.co.uk,
• 30:16
  and we also have a LinkedIn page that we are really trying to keep up
• 30:19
  to date. Um, and a general inquiry email address which is info@dtechnology.co.uk.
• 30:25
  Fabulous. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today. Really fascinating.
• 30:29
  I've been trying to think, have we ever sort of tackled this
• 30:32
  sort of particular subject and have we had a guest on before
• 30:36
  that is even remotely similar? And I can't say that we have in all the
• 30:39
  years of doing the Events in News podcast that we've spoken specifically about
• 30:43
  event security, but specifically about the hardware and to a company
• 30:46
  that deal in the sector that you do. So it's, it's been, it's been genuinely
• 30:50
  interesting to have the, the podcast today and to find out a little
• 30:54
  bit about the world that you guys operate in. And if anybody out there listening
• 30:58
  or watching today's podcast has got any more questions or wants
• 31:01
  to find out a little bit more, if there's anything that I've completely not asked
• 31:04
  Mia today that you would like to ask yourselves, then do get in touch with
• 31:08
  those guys. Like we said, dtechnology.co.uk is the
• 31:11
  website to go to, and as Mia said, LinkedIn, you'll find them on there as
• 31:15
  well. So a couple of mentions for stuff happening at Event Industry News.
• 31:19
  Before we wrap up today's podcast. Um, plenty of news features,
• 31:22
  special supplements, all available on the eventindustrynews.com
• 31:26
  website. And of course, the supplier directory. If you work in the events industry and
• 31:30
  you're looking for a product, service, or a supplier, the chances are you will find
• 31:34
  it on the supplier directory, a comprehensive listing of suppliers within
• 31:38
  the industry on eventindustrynews.com. If you've
• 31:42
  started your journey on the website today by watching today's podcast on video,
• 31:45
  thank you very much for doing so. Please do make sure that you go to
• 31:47
  wherever you get your audio podcasts from and make sure that you like and subscribe
• 31:52
  to the podcast so that you can listen to them when you're out and about.
• 31:54
  Of course, you may have started your journey today by doing exactly that,
• 31:58
  listening to us on your audio podcast platform. If you've done that,
• 32:01
  thanks very much for listening, but please do head over to eventindustrynews.com
• 32:05
  when you have a minute and check out all those little bits that I've just
• 32:08
  mentioned. Once again, my thanks today to my guest Mia Moles
• 32:12
  from d.technology. And it's, uh, been a pleasure to talk all things security on
• 32:16
  today's edition of the Events Industry News Podcast. We'll see you all again very soon.
• 32:20
  Goodbye.