Introduction
Every site manager knows the number they report after a theft: the replacement cost of what walked off. It is almost never the number that matters. The expensive part is the fortnight of schedule slip that follows, the crew standing idle, and the insurance premium that resets at renewal.
We pulled the figures from forty deployments across construction and logistics. The pattern was consistent enough to be uncomfortable.
The replacement invoice accounted for less than a fifth of the true cost of a single overnight theft.
Deterrence changes the arithmetic before the loss ever happens. A lit, monitored perimeter with visible units moves a site from soft target to hard target, and thieves are rational actors who move on.
Conclusion
Price the downtime, not the copper. Once the full cost is on the table, continuous monitoring stops looking like an overhead and starts looking like the cheapest line on the schedule.
