This marks the third time this year that our central station services were honored by different facets of the industry. First, we received the Police Dispatch Quality Award in April 2006, followed secondly by the FARA Achievement Award, bestowed upon us by the False Alarm Reduction Association, an organization comprised primarily of responding police departments.

For this latest award, Security Distributing & Marketing (SDM) Magazine and the Central Station Alarm Association (CSAA) teamed up to honor the efforts of UL Listed central stations in three categories, including (1) Central Station of the Year; (2) Central Station Manager of the Year; and (3) Central Station Operator of the Year.

According to SDM and the CSAA, the awards are designed to recognize outstanding central station services, including the personnel who perform in the highest professional manner; thereby making a significant contribution to the betterment of the alarm industry, while demonstrating exceptional service to their customers and the community.

Although we submitted worthy entries for all three categories, we were honored to capture the most prestigious of the three, The Central Station of the Year Award, which highlighted the exceptional efforts of our Eastern Central Station.

After learning of this most recent success, Ted Stoler said it best when he commented “We here at Vector are truly committed to each other, to our customers and to Vector itself; who gives us all the opportunity to be winners. To receive this ultimate recognition is wonderful in so many ways; and I feel we all have helped place Vector in the class it truly deserves to be; namely top notch and first rate”.

That sentiment was echoed as well by Laura Stepanek, SDM’s Associate Editor. In her address to those in attendance at the awards ceremony on Sunday, she summed up the reasons we were chosen in one simple phrase “a great example of a company that is doing everything right.”

That’s NO accident! Our efforts to constantly improve our central station services occurred through the application of a strict plan by Pam Petrow and her staff over the past number of years.

The plan involved the constant improvement of all aspects of our central station services, culminating with our outstanding efforts to successfully tackle the immense false dispatch problem. This was the subject of a seven-page feature story in the May edition of Security Sales & Integration. These combined results have, in my opinion, produced the best trained, best managed and best performing central station services our industry has to offer.

It’s important to note that our stride towards further excellence was achieved from an initial leading position of strength as a “front runner within the industry,” not as a company who needed to “come up from the pack” to recognize improvements.

There are MANY people within Vector who deserve to be congratulated for their efforts in achieving each one of these awards. They already know who they are and again, I thank them. Now, all of us need to make a conscious effort to become “central station services ambassadors” by driving home the reasons our central station services are so vital in today’s more complex security market.