Case Study: Alarm Panel Rerouter

The Problem

A nationwide alarm monitoring company acquired a large commercial contract from a competitor and needed to change the monitoring number on over 1,000 existing alarm panels.

Their competitor (who installed the panels) would not provide the programming passwords for the panels, so the monitoring number could not be changed by typical reprogramming.

Replacing the panels at every location would be expensive and time-consuming.

The Solution

The project manager contacted us to see what the options were and we designed a customized alarm panel rerouter.

The unit is a small in-line device that goes between the alarm panel and the phone line. It intercepts the original number the panel is programmed to dial, then dials out the alternate number programmed in the rerouter unit.

The monitoring company was able to ship the re-routers to the locations and avoid the expense of replacing the existing alarm panels at each location.

Customer Feedback

"This email is to confirm your quote for the customized redialer. We installed the prototype units at 3 stores and they're working perfectly. These will save us thousands of labor hours... We may end up ordering more than 1,500. I will keep you posted."

Summary

Creative problem solving allowed us to help this customer save thousands of labor hours (not to mention equipment costs) that would have been required to replace the existing alarm panels.

Our experience allowed us to repurpose an existing dialer board with the new functionality with minimal design time and no hardware prototyping costs or delays.