Recognized as one of the top 10 most technologically advanced county governments in the United States, Fulton County is helping establish the standard for e-government practices. Out of more than 3,000 counties in the nation, the Center for Digital Government selected Fulton County two years in a row for its sophisticated use of technology to deliver services to its citizens. With a population of more than 800,000, Fulton County encompasses 529 square miles, and stretches more than 70 miles from one end to the other, and includes the city of Atlanta.

With an annual telecom budget of more than $9 million, Fulton County was receiving all its invoices on paper. Six or seven feet of invoices per month were not uncommon. The County had one employee whose sole responsibility was to make sure all telecom invoices were paid. That employee did this every day, all day and nothing else. No reconciliation. No reporting. No inventory management. If the County wanted to verify long distance costs or produce any kind of report, it required sifting through stacks of paperwork. Even after some vendors began providing invoices via CD, the data was still difficult to analyze.

The Fulton County CIO received approval from the County Board of Commissioners to send out an RFP for an automated electronic billing solution. While initially the focus was on billing, the scope expanded to include auditing, customized reporting, centralized inventory access and other functions that would allow the County to analyze telecom expenses and save taxpayer dollars. Asentinel's software capabilities perfectly matched the County's criteria and even exceeded their expectations.

With Asentinel installed, the most visible benefit is the disappearance of the stacks of invoices. Asentinel's real time automated system allowed their one telecom billing employee to reduce the number of days spent on billing from 30 to 10 days each month. The remainder of the month, the employee spends time on auditing, reconciliation, optimization and other functions that enable the County to make informed decisions about telecom equipment and spending. Fulton County opted for an ASP (Asentinel-hosted) solution, but is considering future migration to a Customer-Hosted deployment with direct integration into their Financial Management system.

Asentinel's reporting capabilities helped Fulton County justify the cost of installing a new fax product that integrates with email. Within hours of initiating the report, the data indicated that the number of fax lines and the cost per line would be significantly reduced with the new fax product. Additional savings would be garnered with the drop in paper and toner costs. This type of detailed reporting was not previously available and would have required extensive hours of research, going from department to department, gathering speculative data that provided no assurance of accuracy.

Asentinel also identified billing discrepancies that were in violation of a contract agreement. Certain telecom services were contractually required to be blocked. After Asentinel was installed, it was clear that the services were not being blocked. The County received a credit going back to 1998. In addition to that error, the County was being charged to block these services when it was part of the contractual agreement. With those two corrections, Asentinel paid for itself twice over.

Once again, Fulton County is at the forefront of technology solutions for county governments.