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The live work is body-worn cameras for a Nigerian client, and everything around them: docking, the central monitoring platform, cloud retention, network, power, manpower and spares.
A programme like that is six or more separate purchases. Buyers are routinely quoted for one of them, and budget for one of them.
We act for West African importers — currently Nigerian — inside Chinese manufacturing. Buyer-side only: no factory pays us, and clients contract and pay manufacturers directly.
The mistake worth avoiding
The camera is usually the smallest number in the programme and the one everyone negotiates hardest.
A quotation that names only the device has not quoted the system. The licences, the retention and the spares arrive later, they recur every year, and by then the supplier has been chosen on a number that never covered them.
So a quotation stage here separates the cost lines behind the unit price and names each one. It is less flattering than a single figure. It is also the only version you can budget against.
Body-worn camera programmes
Sensor and low-light behaviour, battery life across a full shift rather than in a datasheet, on-board storage, ingress and drop rating, whether footage is encrypted on the device, and whether the mount survives the uniform your officers actually wear.
What it decides
Bays per dock, and the question most specifications skip: does the dock upload to the platform or does it only charge. If it only charges, someone offloads a shift of footage by hand, every shift, at every station.
What it decides
Per device or per seat, annual or perpetual, hosted by the vendor or installed on your own server, and who holds the encryption keys. Ask what the licence costs in year three, in writing, before the hardware is chosen.
What it decides
How many months, at what resolution, in whose jurisdiction, and what it costs to get your own footage back out. Retention is the line that grows every month you keep recording, and the one that has to match your evidential requirement rather than the vendor’s default.
What it decides
The uplink available at each station, measured against what a day of footage actually has to move. This is arithmetic, and it is worth doing before the order rather than after the first month of failed uploads.
What it decides
What the docks do when the mains goes, and whether a station’s charging cycle survives an outage of the length that station actually gets. A charging system is an assumption about electricity supply, and it should be written down as one.
What it decides
Someone administers users, categorises footage, handles redaction, applies retention and answers disclosure requests. That is a role, not a task, and it exists on day one whether or not it was budgeted.
What it decides
Batteries are consumable and their service life is shorter than the programme. Mounts, clips and cables are lost rather than broken. Ask for the spares price list at the same time as the unit price, because the leverage disappears afterwards.
What it decides
What applies at your port of entry, what your own regulator requires, and which certificate the manufacturer actually holds as opposed to which one appears on the brochure. A certificate belongs to a model, not to a company.
What it decides
A unit price is ex-works until proven otherwise. Freight, insurance, duty and clearance turn it into the only figure worth comparing between suppliers — the one that lands.
What it decides
The live engagement
Manufacturers
Identified and assessed in body-worn camera hardware.
Products
Captured and compared attribute by attribute.
Specifications
Translated from Chinese, against the client’s own requirement.
Models, one specification
Published under different part numbers with identical specifications.
Adjacent categories
We are equipped to scan and verify in electronic security more broadly — access control, fixed CCTV, alarm and intercom — and in the neighbouring electro-mechanical categories a Nigerian importer commonly buys: power and energy storage, instrumentation and metering, and general specified equipment where the datasheet is the contract.
What we will not do is present that as experience. We have not completed an engagement in those categories. Ask us and you will get the precise answer: what we have sourced, what we have only scanned, and what would be new.
In an unfamiliar category the first stage is a market scan, priced as one. You find out what the market holds at the same moment we do, and you decide whether to go further on the strength of it rather than on the strength of a claim made before the work started.
Where a category is new to us
A sourcing practice that has worked one category properly is more useful than one that claims eight.
Keep reading
Based in Shenzhen, acting for West African importers inside Chinese manufacturing. The live engagement is a body-worn camera programme for a Nigerian client.
