Coinciding with DMP's 50th anniversary, SDM was able to take a tour of the company's Springfield, Mo. headquarters. SDM also spoke with Jon Adams, vice president of sales, DMP, about what the last 50 years means to DMP and what it's looking for in the next 50.

Transcription:

Adams: I think it says a lot to the history of our industry. It’s one that has just continued to grow. This 50th anniversary is time for us to really reflect back on the innovation and the customers that have brought us to this point. I was just with a dealer this week that was like dealer number two that is still using our product.

Our mission statement says that we provide customer-driven products through listening, and anticipating needs. We have kept that at the core of what we do. DMP is customer-driven products, we’re listening, and anticipating needs.

When we hear, “If only the panel would do this,” we just turn around and we do it. I’ve seen us turn around requests that are specific to one customer, and we then roll it out to the rest, but we give it to them because they ask for it. Then we find out others will need it as well. And that's really how we were born.

Marvin Britton, our founder, owned an alarm company, and there were needs that they had that there weren’t products for. So Rick, his son, with his engineering mind, said, “I think I can make that.” And we were built as a research and development branch of Atlas Security, a local alarm company that’s still here in town.

We’ve always stayed very close to the dealers. Cameras are infinitely scalable. Today, they’re detecting people, animals, loitering — stuff like that. Tomorrow, it’s going to be fire right, it’s going to be water. We’re continuing to develop that into the platform. What’s really nice about it is anyone that has these products, when we add these analytics they’re just available to them now. Dealers can reach out to their customers and have that opportunity to increase their RMR. 

One of the things that we put a lot of effort into is backwards and forwards compatibility. So one of the things I want to show you is, for example, this keypad has been discontinued for nearly 30 years. But if you were to connect this to a brand new panel, say the XT75, which we just launched at the end of last year, it would work. We actually had a customer at the end of last year find one of these keypads on eBay. And just to see if it was true — what we said — they bought it and they connected it to an XR 550 panel. It fully works. Not only that but a feature of the panel that we have now is displaying the weather. The customer could see it was displaying on the keypad just like it’s supposed to even though that wasn’t a feature of the keypad back then.

I think the question has always been, “Where do you want the intruder’s feet to be when you’re made aware that something’s happening?” In a residence, do you want to be on the grass or on the carpet? Well, I don’t want it on the carpet. I want their feet in the grass by the time I’m finding out about it — or commercially on the pavement.

Historically, we’ve always kept a large amount of safety stock — not just in finished goods, which is usually six to eight weeks, but also in components. During COVID — and a lot of our customers will definitely recall this — there was that shortage that most people experienced. We did not experience that. We never had a DMP manufacturer product go on backorder because of a component issue. We’re very well insulated for that. We’re going to hold off on any sort of increases, but certainly we haven’t had a need to. We actually anticipate not having to pass that on. We have spread out where we purchase our components from significantly over the last 10 years, and we’re going to continue to negotiate with our buyers as best as we can.

If you were to go and look at our mission, we exist to manufacture alarm panels that create jobs for people. We believe that the security of families helps develop a strong society and a strong society reaches out to the world. We’re going to continue to take all the best steps that we know how, we're going to listen to your needs, and we’re going to create those products. We’re going to continue to put products out in the market that help create jobs and secure families.

We’re really excited to celebrate our first 50 years. We’ll be doing that here in a couple of weeks when we bring all of our field representatives in. We do that already every summer for meetings, but this year we’re having a big celebration. We’re actually inviting our dealer base. We've sent email invites out to come and have a celebration with us, tours, festivities, etc. And then when that’s over, we’ll celebrate and think about it for another couple of days and then we’re looking at the next 50 years of innovation. We’re really excited about it. There never has been a better time to work at DMP or to be a DMP dealer.