Prior to building Action Patterns, understanding your organizational needs and the goals for the alarms is required prior to entering them into Manitou.
What Operations can be Automated?
When reviewing your operation and current comments, here are some items to consider.
- Decision-based items - Any items where a binary, or multiple, decision can be made using a prompt, a database value, or other decision feature. For example:
- Success or failure of a contact.
- Prompt for an Elevator alarm - Upon Elevator alarm arrival, prompt the operator to determine what is true. (No response, children playing, elevator entrapment, medical emergency, etc.)
- Open/Closed status of the area upon which the alarm arrived.
- Zone Number - based on the zone number received, differing actions.
- Medical Alarm arrives for a senior living community. Based on the zone received, who to call and how to process the event.
- Time-based items - Any items that have comments or processes related to time. For example:
- Only contact the site for Burglary alarms outside of business hours.
- Only notify on Trouble, Low Battery, AC Fail, after 9 AM and before 8 PM.
- Hold any Late to Test events until the next morning for.
- Quantity-based items - Any restrictions or limits to how many trips of a zone or event that determine specific actions. For example:
- Burglary Alarms
- If only 1 - Email notification only.
- If 2 - Email notification and contact site to verify.
- If 3 or more - Email and SMS notifications, Dispatch Authority, and make contacts.
- Burglary Alarms
Planning Action Patterns
Understanding the need is the first step toward building detailed and highly effective action patterns. Prior to entering an Action Pattern into Manitou, take the time to review and plan. Each person will have their best process for planing action patterns. In the following examples, we use a flow chart to plan the Action Patterns.
Example 1 - General Schedule based Action
Problem - Hold Late to Test events for notification in the morning.
Flow Chart - The process of the alarm Actions.
What to Add before the Action Pattern
- General Schedule - When action patterns are to be created on the Monitoring Company but used on the Dealer or Customer records, Manitou requires the General Schedules reside on the records where it will be referenced as well as on the Monitoring Company record. These General Schedules must have the exact same ID.
Example 2 - Elevator Alarm
Goal - Capture the details of each elevator alarm.
What to Prepare before the Action Pattern
- Escalation Event Code - Which Event Code to use for emergency alarm escalation.
- Scenarios to include in the Prompt.
Example 3 - Burglary Alarm Counts
Goal - Actions based on the number of Burglary alarms arriving in proximity to one another.
What to Prepare before the Action Pattern
- SQL Query - Select Count Query for Action Pattern counting of Burglary Alarms in the last 5 minutes.
- Email and/or SMS Script - What notification to send to customers.