In April, The Monitoring Association held its annual Virtual Mid-Year Meeting, featuring educational sessions and networking for monitoring professionals.
As part of the event, TMA President Steve Butkovich of CPI Security Systems presented a sort of State of the Association address that outlined two key goals that he has for TMA for this year.
“I have a pretty simple focus,” he explained. “Number one is to evangelize and implement AVS-01; and number two, to continue to evangelize, implement, and expand our efforts with ASAP-to-PSAP.”
AVS-01, the Alarm Validation Scoring Standard, was accredited by ANSI in early 2023 and most recently was fully deployed by Rapid Response Monitoring, which is the first third-party monitoring center to receive a UL-CAVS listing for AVS-01 following two years of preparation and four months of beta testing.
"AVS-01 is the most significant thing in 20 years in the alarm industry,” Butkovich said. “It creates a framework for consistent communication on alarm signals for PSAPs and ECCs, and it supports all the evolving technologies and integration of new data that is coming into our industry. Secondly, it is intended to improve customer communications and outcomes…and improve police response priority.”
Automated Secure Alarm Protocol (ASAP), launched in 2011 as a public-private partnership, is designed to increase the efficiency and reliability of emergency electronic signals from monitoring companies to PSAPs (Now referred to as ECCs). With ASAP, critical life safety signals and accurate information are processed in seconds, not minutes, through the Nlets system of state-to-state PSAP/ECC communication.
“On average, we can save up to two and a half minutes per dispatch by making [ASAP] happen,” Butkovich said. “This saves time both on the ECC side as well as in the monitoring center. We will get better outcomes from a customer standpoint as well. [ASAP] is really starting to gain a lot of momentum. We've set a goal to cover 80% of the U.S. population by 2028.”
To accomplish that goal, Butkovich said TMA will be hiring a partner to help run the ASAP program and to advocate with ECCs for further adoption.
“Like all technologies that are advancing, we also need to be able to support more rich content like video and other things that can also be communicated through this transport and further future proof our monitoring centers and the future of professional monitoring,” Butkovich said.
“If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself,” Butkovich added. “It is the collective of [TMA] members and associate members working toward a common goal that allows us to be successful as an industry. The message to the rest of the industry and to the ECCs and PSAPs is that we are united from that perspective.”
Learn more about ASAP at https://tma.us/programs/asap.
