The US sustains approximately 50,000 US military personnel in their bases in Japan each year. These troops, their families, and other transient travelers destined for Asia, rely on on-base temporary lodging to help ease their transition. The goal of the lodging is to provide soldiers, civilians and their families with a quality of life commensurate with the quality of their service.
To accurately control costs and track guest calls, an overseas military base needed a call accounting solution. Building upon the existing NEC UNIVERGE™ phone system, NEC sales engineer Jose Maldonado recommended ProfitWatch Call Accounting by Metropolis Corp.
ProfitWatch integrates seamlessly with the UNIVERGE platform to provide enhanced revenue generation using flexible surcharge capabilities.
Though the military base is under US jurisdiction, the physical location being in Japan presented some special issues during installation. “[Our other Call Accounting System] wasn’t going to work,” explained Stephen Spencer, NEC account manager who worked closely with Maldonado on the project. “ProfitWatch was priced right compared to other solutions and met the customer’s needs.”
Maldonado adds, “The first challenge was in reconfiguring the number plan detection to accommodate local and long distance calling, as it relates to area codes in Japan.”
ProfitWatch was priced right compared to other solutions and met the customer’s needs.
Stephen Spencer, NEC
ProfitWatch is installed preloaded with rate tables and data to support the U.S. market, but is customizable to easily import local data to support international installations. Secondly, Maldonado needed to connect the trunk lines for the base lodging with the rest of the military base. Maldonado created a mechanism to distinguish reporting on certain trunk lines versus public line trunks. Once this was complete, the system was configured to determine which numbers needed to be reported on, and which did not.
Another unique challenge faced was handling emergency calls. Most members of the base’s community were familiar with dialing 911 in an emergency, which wouldn’t work in Japan. Again, Maldonado used his creativity to solve the problem and modified the NEC SIP server to reroute any 911 call to the local military police on base.
Maldonado explained that though the SIP server took care of the conversion, “…ProfitWatch was seeing a whole different number. But we were able to classify that [in the call accounting software] as a special number for tracking.”
Once the ProfitWatch call accounting solution was running correctly, the next step for NEC was to connect the system to the Property Management System (PMS). ProfitWatch contains the ability to process call records with or without a PMS integration, so employees on the base were able to operate for a couple of months before the cut over was complete. The PMS system was located in the U.S. and connected via IP. Shortly after the integration, the PMS experienced a failure over a holiday weekend and took several days to get back online.
However, the employees at the Japan location were unaffected, as they had been trained on the ProfitWatch system to process calls without the PMS. Maldonado concluded, “I like ProfitWatch and would recommend it. It is very versatile, and I found its interface to be very easy to use.”
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