TECHNOLOGY/Call accounting software reduces telecom expenses

Hartford, Conn., has long recognized the need to control telecommunications expenses. Ten years ago, the city installed a call accounting system to help monitor incoming and outbound calls in city departments. When it became clear last year that the system could no longer serve the city’s needs, city managers upgraded telecommunications management.

Hartford, located midway between New York and Boston, has a population of approximately 130,000 residents. Hartford’s city government operates from four primary campuses. The 1,800 telephones in the city system generate about 500,000 external calls per month.

The old management system provided a series of reports that helped the city pinpoint excessive expenditures. For example, it highlighted expensive international calls and situations in which employees were making a large number of personal calls to a particular number. Police sometimes used the reports in internal affairs investigations. However, one drawback to the system was that it could not produce custom reports.

To compile phone reports each month, a technician had to drive to each of the city campuses, download the call data onto floppy diskettes, take the diskettes to the information services offices and upload the information into the call accounting system. The entire process took several days each month.

Seeking a less labor-intensive way to generate call reports, Hartford’s information services staff purchased software from Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, N.J. Developed by Veramark Technologies, Pittsford, N.Y., the package includes several integrated modules that perform call accounting, fraud detection, service management and trouble ticketing.

The new system already has helped Hartford reduce telecommunications expenses by eliminating the need to manually collect data. It automatically surveys inexpensive pollable storage units (PSUs), which are connected to each of the city’s four voice communications systems.

Once every hour, the software downloads call data from the PSUs. Reports are generated each month to indicate call count, average, total duration, cost, date, facility and most frequently called numbers. Those reports are provided to department heads, who use them to guard against abuse and hacker penetration.

The system also can produce customized reports, including * trend reports that show statistics per facility for the current year, the busiest hour of the day and the number of trunks required; * analysis reports that summarize call activity for each hour of the day and ring time statistics; * exception reports that detail calls rejected by the carrier service; most expensive calls; longest calls; frequently dialed numbers; activity for various call cost ranges; and activity for call duration ranges; and * real-time reports that generate a graphical representation of call activity.

Department managers say that the new system has had a significant impact on telecommunications costs. They have frequently investigated situations in which telecommunications expense seemed to be excessive, particularly when international calls were involved. Once employees got the message that the length and cost of their calls were being monitored, abuse disappeared almost overnight.

The program also provides comprehensive toll fraud detection. In the past, that was a time-consuming, manual process. Every morning, a technician would check activity reports to determine whether security had been breached. Now, the HackerTracker function provides comprehensive checks as often as necessary without any manual intervention from personnel.

In addition to recording call data and preventing fraud, the system has helped the city make capital improvements. For example, reports on the call accounting system showed that, despite having the smallest volume of calls from any of the four city campuses, calls generated by the school system’s administrative offices to other school sites totaled nearly half of the 100 most frequently called numbers each month. The accurate call volume analysis made it possible to demonstrate that a private fiber network between school sites would pay for itself in a relatively short period of time. The school district installed the network in February.