A two-dissimilar-unit cold standby redundant system is analysed under the assumption that a random administrative time is spent in locating the repairman and getting hint to the system location. The failure, repair and administrative delay are assumed to follow arbitrary distributions, and several reliability characteristics of interest to system designers as well as operations managers have been evaluated. Suitable measures for studying the effect of administrative delay have been defined and illustrated numerically. A number of results obtained earlier are derived as particular cases.