Improving the cost effectiveness of operating ATMs

When an ATM fails in is most likely to be one of the following causations:

• the utility power such as that supplied by the municipality or Eskom has failed;
• the ATM hardware has failed; and
• the network connectivity to the ATM has failed.

In all cases a network management tool does not provide causation. The loss of connectivity to the ATM and the ATM infrastructure does not provide any measure of realtime diagnosis. Should power be restored the network management tool can potentially determine whether ther has been a power outage by referencing the system clock on the network equipment and determining if it has been reset.
Some network equipment have a "last gasp" functionality, but in most deployment cases this does not function. The equipment failure is combined upstream with a service provider failure and the alerts are not received.
The DS solution is to use a Powalert.
The Powalert is an Internet of Things sensor that interoperates with the wider range of sensors and gateways in the PowaINFRA range. The range addresses a number of uses cases in Information Technology, food processing, medical, building and real estate management and the financial sector.
The Powalert provides:

• Provides up time Service Level Agreement (SLA) metrics for the utility feed which is directly connected;
• Provides up time SLA metrics for attached equipment;
• Reports energy usage in kW/h;
• Provides a historical record of power quality;
• Remote Power On Reset (POR) of the attached equipment;
• Ability to monitor life of battery attached to inverter; and
• Ability to monitor SLA metrics for utility feed into inverter.

The Powalert is able to provide causation to any outage as was described in the opening statements of this post.
The bank's operations centre will dispatch a resource to an ATM to determine the cause of an outage. The cause is unknown until the resource is on site. The cost of the rolling wheels visit to the ATM also involves the provision of suitable security which is an additional expense. Dependent on the skills of the resource, they might not be able to address the cause of the outage and re-institute service. If this is the case, then multiple rolling wheels are required to bring the ATM back online. The Powalert allows the operations centre to determine causation in realtime and thus the operations centre can dispatch the most appropriate resource. Additionally, if a network or equipment failure is suspected the operations centre can implement a standard operating procedure to reset the equipment with a remote power down. Should the service automatically recover using this process, then a rolling wheels dispatch is negated. The measures described here reduce the operational costs of ATM management.

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