Acadian Monitoring Services

About Acadian Monitoring Services

Acadian Monitoring Services specialise in residential, commercial, industrial, fleet, video, and medical monitoring services. Headquartered in Lafayette, Louisiana and maintaining multiple redundant locations nationwide, they began providing video monitoring services throughout the United States in 2008. Acadian pride themselves on going above and beyond to ensure that their people, services and technologies are certified to exceed industry standards.

The problem of nuisance alarms

Acadian Monitoring Services’ primary challenge was nuisance alarm management. Their monitoring station was receiving a high volume of alarms from CCTV sites, a large percentage of which were deemed to be false. This was due to a number of factors, commonly that installation companies were over-reliant on basic analytics.

Although Acadian had been actively taking steps to improve the issue, such as dealer notifications and protocol changes, this was merely masking the issue and wasn’t addressing the core problem of eliminating the nuisance alarms in the first place.

A solution to nuisance alarm management

As a result of the nuisance alarm challenge, Acadian began facing further issues including scalability concerns, excessive response times and operator turnover. Although they had been looking for a cloud-based platform that would work with multiple camera manufacturers and effectively reduce false alarms to solve this problem for over four years, they were unable to find a suitable solution.

Acadian then engaged with Calipsa, starting with a trial period to determine whether it offered the right solution. They also wanted to identify any delays in event handling, since alarms would be sent to Calipsa before reaching Acadian’s video monitoring software. After testing Calipsa’s False Alarm Filtering Platform, Acadian were satisfied that events were received almost instantaneously, which made it an easy decision to move forward.

We've had great success using Calipsa and they have been great to work with and incredibly supportive. It's easy to set-up and their portal provides the dealer with a number of tools that make it easy to reduce false alarms. I especially like the reporting features that are available to the dealer.

BRANDON NILESDirector of Operations

Achieving false alarm reduction

Since working with Calipsa, Acadian have already seen significant reduction in nuisance alarms. In the past month alone, they have seen false alarm reduction of over 75%. With additional analysis, they are hoping to see this eclipse 95% later in the year.

By reducing nuisance alarms, Acadian have also been able to better prioritise events, allowing their operators to respond to genuine alarms quicker and protect sites more efficiently. Finally, they have seen improved margins due to a reduction in operator handled signals but also because more work can be done remotely to improve site set-up.

At this time, Acadian Monitoring Services are in the process of identifying 50 of their existing sites to upgrade to Calipsa while simultaneously working with their installation companies to start using Calipsa as their primary source of video analytics.