Online bills and listings improve phone system management

For years, monitoring phone bills and usage at UW–Madison meant leafing through page after page of listings printed in tiny type from mainframe computer files. Seventy-five copies of those Telephone Activity Reports were printed each month and clipped by hand for distribution to hundreds of campus offices, where staff would review them, often long after the listed calls were made.

That task has now been replaced by online listings viewable on the Web, enabling easy reading and bill reconciliation and better resource management for the campus. Although electronic phone bills are the most visible benefit, the new system also provides other features that will improve the management of UW–Madison’s voice communication resources.

More than 25,000 phone lines are in place at UW–Madison, plus another 1,000 cell phones and 1,000 calling cards. The new system makes it easier to keep track of them all. Each month, the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) notifies authorized users by e-mail that the online reports are ready for viewing. The users then log on to a Web site with their NetID and password. The first electronic bills went out in February.

The new electronic reports:

• match people’s names with telephone numbers, cellular service and calling cards (when available);
• list phone numbers that made no local or long-distance calls during the billing period; and
• summarize costs by telephone number and service type

Departments and projects can now easily flag inactive phone lines, which can either be reassigned (thus saving setup charges for new staff who need a phone) or disposed of to save the monthly usage fees.

For a complete guide to the new online phone management system, see http://www.doit.wisc.edu/telephone/centrex/billing.asp.