James City County (VA) has gone live with the Automated Secure Alarm Protocol (ASAP) program, becoming the second county in the United States to implement ASAP. SunGard Public Sector completed its first ASAP integration solution with SunGard’s ONESolution CAD for James City County’s Emergency Communications Center. ASAP is an American National Standard developed by APCO and the Central Station Alarm Association that streamlines the delivery of alarm notifications between alarm monitoring companies and 9-1-1 Public Safety Answering Points.

“Thanks to SunGard’s compliance with the ASAP standard, alarm companies that use ASAP will no longer have to manually call in events to James City County’s Emergency Communications Center,” said Bill Hobgood, project coordinator for APCO’s Comm Center & 9-1-1 Services Department. “The process can be completely automated, which decreases telephone call volume to 9-1-1 centers from the alarm industry, decreases PSAP processing time, helps reduce mistakes and helps ensure quicker response time.”

The ASAP program is now a mature published APCO standard that is available to both CAD providers and alarm monitoring automation providers.

ONESolution CAD’s new ASAP feature set facilitates the automatic processing of alarm events as a new call-for-service appearing in the Open Calls window awaiting dispatch. Likewise, dispatchers can receive live updates from Alarm Monitoring Companies concerning an active alarm event, such as requests to cancel the dispatch or key-holder information. Dispatchers also have the ability to send updates to the alarm company operator. By helping to streamline communication, the integration helps improve agency efficiency and accuracy while helping provide faster service for alarm industry clients.

Click here to read SunGard’s press release.

For more information about the ASAP project, visit http://www.apco911.org/resources/asap.html.

About the Author
Bill Hobgood is a project manager for the City of Richmond’s DIT Public Safety Team with 41 years of experience in public safety. He is also a project coordinator for APCO’s Comm Center & 9-1-1 Services Department and a subject matter expert on the ASAP project. Contact Bill via e-mail.