Automate the Routine - Manage the Exceptions

The Communicator! is designed to contact and alert or mobilise, tens or hundreds of people in a short space of time. It often sits side-by-side with a dispatch system in an emergency centre, but does not replace it.

The Communicator! will call response teams, local residents or management on their office phone, home phone, cell phone, pager, radio, email and fax. It will "hunt" down a contact until it finds them or runs out of numbers to try which will trigger an alert. The communication loop is closed by asking questions that are answered by pressing buttons on the phone. People notified by pager, simply dial into The Communicator! and answer the questions in the same way.

Each and every call made or received, is logged with all details such as timestamp, person and number called, phone response (engaged, answering machine, etc) and the person's answers (able/unable to respond, ETA, etc). Reports containing this information, can be printed, faxed or emailed during the call-out, or months afterwards.
Instead of using highly skilled disaster managers to man the phones, The Communicator! makes the calls and allows them to make the decisions that will mitigate the situation.

Benefits

Call-outs are 10 - 20 times faster than manual methods. Saves on telephone-call charges. Average Communicator! call is 30 seconds Know who is responding before they arrive on site allowing specific action to be taken if necessary Ensures that a contact is fit for duty/properly equipped before mobilisation Calls out only the people that are needed based on their skills. E.G. find the first 3 available fireman from a list of 20 Runs desktop drills and tests at a fraction of the cost of normal exercises. Keeps all recipient details (phone numbers, skills, etc) in one database for easy maintenance Ensures uniformity of communication by delivering exactly the same message to everyone Calls the right people in the right order at the right time Before a message is delivered a Personal Identification Number can be requested to ensure that the correct person has been contacted Automates the routine calls freeing your skilled personnel to manage the situation at hand Removes the assumptions from call-outs. Only positive responses are logged and unanswered calls will cause the system to call another number or another contact Makes the message easy to understand by using the recipient's home language Keeps everyone up-to-date by printing, faxing or emailing reports automatically Windows-based, Customer-maintained and easy to use. Top

Specific Features

Includes a database that contains details of contact people and their skills and phone numbers. Groups and contact people who are members of each. Scenario (call-out) details including groups and messages for each. Voice messages and which Scenarios use them. Will make voice calls to Telkom and Cellular phones plus telephony-capable radios. Will call pre-defined groups of people in the order specified Each contact person may have various phone numbers and The Communicator! can call each of them to locate the contact. Confirmation of receipt of a message can be requested, asking the contacted person to press buttons on his phone to answer yes or no to specific questions such as: Are you fit for duty? Can you respond? What is your ETA at the scene? Contacts are grouped together either by name or by a specific skill. Up to 5 skills can be assigned to each contact. A contact can be in more than one group. Contacts can call into The Communicator! and receive messages after supplying their PIN. An audit trail of all calls made is kept for each Scenario. Reports containing details (time/date, person called, telephone number used, success/failure status for each call attempted) of each call-out, can be printed, faxed or emailed. Incident-specific or "on-the-fly" messages can be recorded when a call-out is started. Scenarios can be started or stopped remotely via a touch-tone phone. Multiple Scenarios can be active simultaneously with the highest priority taking precedence. Real-time activation monitor shows contacts that have been called, are being called and are still to be called, together with the status of each. An unlimited number of scenarios can be defined and placed in user-defined categories. The Communicator! automatically calls each recipient and updates phone numbers Comprehensive system security Runs on standard PC type computers Interfaces with existing telephone systems - can dial 0 for outside line

Performance matrix

Phone lines	Number of people to be contacted
	10	25	50	100	250	500	1000
4	3	5	10	19	47	94	187	Minutes
8	2	3	5	10	23	47	94	Minutes
12	1	3	4	7	18	31	62	Minutes
16	1	2	3	4	9	19	38	Minutes
24	1	2	2	3	8	16	31	Minutes
28	1	1	2	3	7	13	27	Minutes
32	1	1	2	3	6	12	24	Minutes

Selected Users
SASOL Secunda. Johannesburg International Airport. Durban International Airport. Cape Town International Airport Petro South Africa Mossel Bay U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Delta Air Lines	Nederland’s Railways Intel Corporation Chase Manhattan Bayer Corporation State of California City of Los Angeles Emergency Operations Ontario Hydro (Canada)