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CASE STUDY

Menlo Park, California
Police Department

AlarmTrack™—Alarm Permitting and False Alarm Billing
City of Menlo Park

Case Summary:

The City of Menlo Park, California is a full-service city with a population of 30,648. Menlo Park, a Tree City USA community, is a quiet yet vibrant city of pleasant, tree-lined neighbor­hoods and friendly people. Situated on “The Peninsula,” Menlo Park is conveniently located between San Francisco and Oakland on the North and San Jose on the South located in San Mateo County, incorporated 1927. It is chiefly residential, with publishing and elec­tronic equipment manufacturing indus­tries. Located here are Menlo College (1927), Saint Patrick’s Seminary (1894), and Stanford Research Institute or SRI International (1946). Settled in the 1850s, the city grew after the arrival of the railroad in 1863. It is named for Menlough, Ireland. With over 1000 alarm permits, the City has a real need to efficiently handle the many residential and business permits and their various rate structures.

In order to be able to track alarm history at any location, historical information is kept readily available for an indefinite number of years so that users are able to quickly look up an address while on the phone and view complete detailed payment information and all correspondence including letters, documents etc. relating to that location.

As technology has changed, Progressive Solutions® has encouraged the city to take advantage of new opportunities by providing regular software upgrades. These upgrades allow the city to transition smoothly to the ongoing enhancements to the software.

The city has standardized on Microsoft® tech­nology including Windows,® SQL Server and Office. PSI software incorporates Microsoft® standards to ensure reliable, robust and pro­gressively improving software.

Alarm Billing staff at the City of Menlo Park Police Department have suffered from a city developed access alarm permitting/false alarm billing program for several years. It had been cumbersome and did not have features for late

fees, tiered billing or ways to sort and match information. Inefficiencies of the systems re­sulted in additional labor and missed reve­nue opportunities. This led the city to search for a full featured software application that could integrate with their general ledger package, provide flexible ad hoc reporting and offer the efficient means to notify and track individual account activity.

AlarmTrack,™ the alarm permitting system from Progressive Solutions® has enabled the City to automate their false alarm billing by obtaining false alarm data directly from the RIMS police computer aided dispatch system. This enables the city to: bill for false alarms in a fraction of the time previously required, obtain answers and make operating changes without pro­gramming or additional cost. Up­grades and minimal report customizations are included in the annual support fee so that ad hoc requirements do not require additional mid year budgeting.

The Future

As needs and technologies continue to evolve at the City of Menlo Park Police Department, Janette Lanier, the Alarm Billing coordinator, is confident that Progressive Solutions® will be there to assist the city with their changing needs and to continue with the ongoing stream of improvements. “Yvonne, my alarm billing representative is loving the system!” We are also interested in automating our manual Parking Permitting operations. “If the parking permitting system is half as good as the alarm permitting, we are very interested.”

About Progressive Solutions®

Progressive Solutions,® developer of the QuickServe™ Suite, brings heightened secur­ity, efficiency and convenience to users. Pro­gressive Solutions® has incorporated next generation hardware and software technology enabling market-ready governmental enter­prise solutions. Based in Brea, California, the company distributes their product through an extensive network of VAR and reseller channels and has entered into strategic partnerships.

PROGRESSIVE SOLUTIONS®
P O Box 783, Brea, CA 92822-0783
714-671-1597
sales@progressivesolutions.com
www.progressivesolutions.com