‘Contact Central' has been designed to remotely sense alarm conditions and, based on their urgency, escalate them to an engineer. The system allocates faults, by skill, to our Helpdesk engineers or to our duty engineer's pager or mobile telephone by SMS messaging. This provides field service personnel with alarm information enabling them to remotely acknowledge, clear alarms, or review the site's alarm history.
Engineers initiate a session with remote equipment by simply clicking on a site icon which provides integration with software tools such as terminal emulation packages. The ‘Contact Central' database can be reviewed to establish the history of any particular alarm and to demonstrate compliance with service performance targets. Information retained includes the original time and date of fault detection by the remote site system element, the ‘Reporter', through to the fault clearance report.
The system, built around a host system, communicates with a ‘Reporter' device which in turn is connected the remote PBX. The Reporter, which is on duty 24x7, detects alarms, filters them locally and reports them to the host system.
Alarms can be filtered for priority, frequency and duration. Major alarms can be set to cause immediate dial out and minor alarms configured to dial out only when certain criteria are met. Digital alarms can be set up in a similar way and configured to trigger only if they are present for a specified duration.
‘Reporters' can be set to call any two of 16 telephone numbers to report an alarm occurrence, in the event of a failure to connect, this is repeated until a successful alarm delivery has occurred. Multiple digital inputs, Ethernet ports and serial interfaces can be used to gather alarm information or to store serial data. Alarms and stored data can be delivered over a serial interface, an internal/external modem or an Ethernet port. Each Reporter can be remotely configured and a series of commands can be used to set all alarm parameters, passwords, interface attributes and data storage memory allocation. Access is controlled with a 16-character password protection system. A number of passwords can be assigned and each used to restrict access to various areas of the system. An alarm dial out can be initiated if unauthorised passwords are received.
When alarms are received, alarm dockets are presented to the screen of every logged-on user with permission to monitor that site. An audible signal can be generated every 10 seconds until the docket is acknowledged.
The ‘acknowledge docket' outlines the appropriate action to be taken upon receipt of each alarm and the name of the user is automatically added to the alarm history file on acknowledgement.
When an alarm clear request is generated, a window appears which allows up to 100 lines of freeform text to be written up in a clearance report, when the alarm is cleared the name of the user is added to the alarm history file.
Supervisors can add a site group and assign user password authority to view the group. Groups consist of multiple sites, and represent a customer, geographical region, network or a combination of these. Sites are easily added and linked on the network schematic.
Alarms can be added individually to any site and alarm configurations can be copied from one site to another. They can be given a severity rating and up to 5 lines of freeform text to describe the action to be taken on receipt of an alarm.
A number of duty rotas can be configured for every site, each with different shift patterns if required which can be used by the system to call out the duty engineer assigned to that site at the time of the alarm receipt.
Each engineer is given a code and can be assigned to a number of shifts and duty rotas and their details can be stored in ‘Contact Central'.
Configuration dependant
