Introducing the Innovative Manitou 2.1 – Part 3

By Josh Tafoya, Technical Trainer

Bold Group is very pleased to announce the availability of Manitou version 2.1! To help “spread the word,” we are spending some time on our Bold blog highlighting some of the exciting new features built into Manitou’s newest release. Some of the newly created features are long-time requests from several of our monitoring center partners. This week, we’re taking an in-depth look at a feature which has been highly anticipated: Automatic Comments:

One of the features that I’ve been asked about the most throughout the years is the ability to have pre-defined comments that can be automatically filled in by the operator.

Yes, of course it speeds things along, which is the main reason alarm operators have been asking for it.

But a large number of Central Station Managers have been looking forward to this feature. Again, they are excited about the speed and efficiency it offers their operators, whom they hold to high standards for alarm response time. It didn’t surprise me to learn, though, that the Central Station Managers also longed for consistency when it came to the logs.

Every operator is different; and given the ability to write their own comments on the alarm resolution screen, every operator is going to type something different. Of course, they are still held to the same time restraints I mentioned earlier, so they are going to abbreviate whenever possible.

In the following example, we see that the operator attempted to abbreviate the cause of the alarm:

Automating Comments - Before

Among the Central Station Manager’s concerns are not only the inconsistency, (because the next operator will abbreviate the same message in a different way) but also that the operator (because they were hurried, after all) did not use mixed case by capitalizing the first word.

The solution then is to create a list of standard comments. Each monitoring center is able to edit their own list of standard comments to fit their needs. Now the same comment when closing an alarm can have the double benefit of speeding up the process AND providing consistent, properly spelled, properly capitalized comments, which STILL reflect the message the operator was trying to log:

Automating comments - After

By simply typing the code of 100 in the CODE blank, and clicking on the icon to the right, Manitou is able to insert the code that was previously, thoughtfully, spelled out (correctly), and will be entered the same way.

Every. Single. Time.

Of course, this is not just for the comments when resolving an alarm. It also appears in nearly all the places where comments can be entered. Contacting a keyholder on an alarm? You can enter one of the pre-defined comments if it’s appropriate. Making changes on a customer account? You can use the pre-defined comments to add the reason for the edit to the log.

And editing the list of previously defined comments is easy as well. Many of you are already familiar with the SUBTYPES screen in the Supervisor Workstation. This is the same screen you might use to edit, say, the Action Pattern Categories or the Keyholder Types.

Having spent a lot of time with customers, I’m excited to see this added, along with the other exciting new features, to Manitou 2.1. Check back next week as we discuss another new enhancement!