Multimatics launches network record catching

You have just received your telecommunications invoice from your network provider. Unfortunately there are at least three invoices - one from Telkom, one from your international provider and one (or two or three) from your cellular provider, and you have no idea how to allocate these costs back to individual departments or cost centres. Your telephone management system is not able to help you, either because you do not have one or because its telling you something completely different to the invoices you have just received.

Until a few years ago your company had one choice as to who to use to carry your telecoms traffic, and that was Telkom. Then the international least cost carriers entered the fray, amid a lot of legal battles. Then the cellular least cost carriers, also with their legal teams intact, started operations. Those battles have now been won and lost and now we have the prospect of the SNO and VOIP.

There are currently four public network providers who offer switched telephone calls, and a myriad of private providers. With the advent of the SNO there will be five public switching providers, and, with the advent of legalised VOIP there are likely to be at least 100 public providers and possibly 300 private ones.

The problem is that public switching providers offer exchange lines, and these exchange lines are independent of the extension used to make or receive a call. Because of this, the network providers are unable to tell their clients` how the call costs should be allocated. And, the result is that the client is unable to allocate expenditure back to extensions and cost centres.

In general, most of your company`s calls will leave your building via your PABX. Your PABX sends the call on to one of the public or private switching networks. However, at the time it does this, it will also output a record detailing the extension that made the call, the dialed number, the call duration and the date and time the call was made.

Says John Bannister, head of IT at Multimatics, "If you have the right tools at your disposal, it is fairly easy to take a networks record which has the dialed number, the date and time of the call and the duration and cost of the call and then match it back to the extension that made the call. All you need is the PABX record detailing the extension."

But, its not quite as simple as Bannister suggests. The date and time on the PABX may well be different to that of the network provider. The call durations will also be different. What you need is a system that does multiple passes on both sets of records and finds the matches using techniques that are strict to start with and are slowly relaxed. Also, records can appear in one or the other sets of outputs that do not appear in the output you are trying to match.

This is one area where Xtel`s power comes into play. It is able to predict which extension was the most likely to dial the particular number.

If your company is attempting to allocating your network providers costs back to cost centres, you will probably find that it is taking two or three people many hours a month to do the job. And, it will not be accurate.

Comments Steven Brown, MD of Multimatics, Xtel quietly sits in the background and does the job automatically on a daily basis as the records are received from the PABX and the network provider. "We can take the records from the PABX and the records from multiple network providers, and consolidate them into one apportionable set of reports that make sense to your accounting department. All we need is your internal company telephone directory."