"Fiscal Year ending June 30? Get monitoring in your next budget... "

If you're a state government or other entity whose fiscal year ends on June 30, now is the time to get monitoring into your upcoming budget.

You need to start early to make sure funding is available. If you think you can't afford monitoring, just imagine how much your next outage will cost you - time, dollars, and overall grief.

These 3 tips will help you to get mission-critical monitoring gear in your budget:

1. Act fast before funding is allocated
   You don't have long before budget planning is complete. You need to get your requests in soon if you want to be included in the next budget cycle. Call DPS, learn about your options, and...
2. Get a budgetary proposal
   Getting a proposal from DPS is your first step toward proving value to management. DPS Telecom proposals are way more than a price list - you'll get case studies, application drawings, and a complete executive summary. Don't waltz up to your manager and "wing it." Get information in print that proves you've done your homework.
3. Get an alarm monitoring ROI Analysis
   If you go to your manager asking for funding, you'd better be able to justify the expense. Even if you ARE the manager, you'd better be able to justify the expense.
   
   To help you prove the value of alarm monitoring, DPS offers a complimentary ROI analysis. Just by answering a few questions about your current operations, you'll get a detailed picture of your estimated savings from improved alarm monitoring. You'll learn how quickly the system should
   pay for itself, and how much you're losing every day without good monitoring gear.

It's also a good idea to find out if you having any budget money left over this year. Alarm monitoring infrastructure - on a dollar-for-dollar basis - is often just a small fraction of the cost of other telemetry gear.

You might find that you can provide your sites with critical monitoring protection with "leftover" budget from this year.

The High Cost of Limited Staffing Resources.

• The cost of human resources is rising.
  Qualified technical staff are hard to come by. Efficiently managing your human resources is critical, especially in this age of making due with fewer people.
• Learn how to get better results with limited resources.
  Providing increased and automated visibility into your network allows you to best leverage the resources that you have. You'll quickly identify and react to changing field conditions.

Better-Prepared Dispatch Technicians.

• With more information, your technicians will be more effective.
  When a network site has a problem and a technician must be dispatched, you will know where the problem occurred. You will know what piece of equipment is down. You'll know what tools and replacement parts are necessary to restore service.
• With better technician briefing, your operations will be more efficient.
  This will reduce the number of unproductive trips to remote sites. Your technicians will be prepared with correct replacement parts, tools, and appropriate information.

Budget not large enough for full system deployment?

This is not an uncommon situation in this age of tightening budgets. But, how do you balance the need for proper alarm monitoring within the remainder of your budget? How do you address the mandates for better monitoring?

System deployment within your budget

First of all, by using a DPS alarm master, you have already achieved a substantial budget savings while achieving an amazing level of functionality. However, the real issue relates to RTU deployment strategies. Many of our clients have adopted a policy which deploys RTUs over several budget cycles. This not only helps with the CAP-X budget, it also puts less strain on the technical / installation resources.

Useful Links:

Cost Reduction Through Alarm Monitoring
Monitor Small Sites Without Overspending On Excess Alarm Capacity