Diebold Inc. earned the coveted Central Station of the Year Award in CSAA’s Excellence Awards competition, it was announced yesterday during the awards presentation held at ESX in Charlotte, N.C. Diebold operates monitoring centers located in Uniontown, Ohio and Honolulu, Hawaii.

One of the most notable projects Diebold accomplished in 2010 was the conversion of one of its largest retail customers from dial-up alarm panel connections to IP-based technology. The project involved installing new alarm panels at more than 7,000 locations within a seven-month time period. The central station tested and verified installations at more than 1,000 locations per month, meeting the project deadline successfully. During the same time period, the central station also brought on a new retail account with more than 600 locations.

“There are not many central stations that can handle this kind of volume, and continue to earn recognition for the superior quality of its operations,” said Laura Stepanek, Editor of SDM, which co-sponsors the CSAA Excellence Awards.

Diebold’s Monitoring Centers are CSAA Five Diamond certified. They also hold multiple UL certifications, including a CRZM listing that certifies it to deliver alarm monitoring services for the U.S. government, as well as CRZM and CRZH listings that enable the central station to provide, install, maintain and monitor alarm systems at U.S. government UL 2050 certificated sites.

The central stations employ seven supervisors and nearly 50 operators.

Earning an honorable mention as Central Station of the Year was Acadian Monitoring Services, Lafayette, La., which also is CSAA Five Diamond certified and UL 2050 certified.

Acadian recently created a four-way live redundancy between its four central stations. The redundancy actually shares data between all four stations for all accounts, signals and history. With all four stations being on the same automation platform, Acadian’s dealers have access to more services, a unified platform with four-way redundancies to ensure the integrity of the national account base from ISP and telecom outages, and weather-related incidences such as hurricanes and winter storms.

The CSAA also presented Excellence Awards in the following categories to:

Central Station Support Person of the Year – Brian Nussbaum, central monitoring technician III, State Farm Insurance

Honorable Mention – Angie Montgomery, data entry supervisor, ADS Security

Central Station Operator of the Year – Melanie Warych, central station supervisor, Vector Security’s Western Monitoring Center

Honorable Mention – Rodney Freeman, senior emergency dispatch operator, Monitronics

Central Station Manager of the Year – Amy Jo Feliciano, central station operations manager, Engineered Protection Systems

Honorable Mention – Christine Mudrak, central station manager, ADS Security

All of the CSAA Excellence Awards winners will be profiled in SDM’s August 2011 issue.