The Customer Challenge
A government post office with over 5000 remote cash registers connected via cellular had experienced a multi-million dollar cost overage in telecom charges from both transient employee abuse and the inability to monitor and detect overages in their distributed environment. The data plans for cash registers were of limited size and overage costs were not only high but would add up rapidly once they started.
The Logicognosis Solution
Logicognosis worked directly with the carrier, the equipment manufacturer and the customer to put in place a threshold based monitoring solution though the management APIs of the modems used to communicate with the cash registers. While the equipment did not provide methods for this, we were able to work with the manufacturer to gain access under NDA to usage data and build our own methods to bring the data back to the telecom expense management system.
With minimal overhead and a combination of triggers, notifications and polling, a solutions was deployed that would generate alerts for errant terminals and forewarn of any potential and actual overages through tracking actual usage and matching this to the plan.
Impact on the Customers Business
The end result was a system that allowed the post office to identify to the time of day and to the shift and individual cash register any problems as they occurred. Management was able to take action immediately to correct and eliminate overages and abuses in their remote sales kiosks.