Applications - Telephone Usage

Daisy can plot traffic on any communications network by factors, such as call duration, hour of the day and exchange or number called to ascertain problems, strengths or possible improvements, in either your network, people or methods.

A typical Daisy Chart of the calls made from a PABX, might show daily and weekly variations, call durations and where most of your external calls are routed.

It would use four groups or mapping fields of nodes, each of which are arranged in an arc of a circle.

• The first two mapping fields represent the day of the week and the hour of the day. This simple mapping will show any daily or hourly pattern in the data.

• The next mapping field of nodes, would show the exchange dialled or a special call such as directory enquiries. Typically, only the most commonly used are shown in order of the Number of Calls made. Note that the number of nodes shown can be easily changed and the chart redrawn.

• The last mapping field would show the Call Duration, numerically partitioned as 0-300, 300-600 etc. As all call durations are typically held in the original database as seconds, this gives five minute partitions.

The intensity of the links between the nodes show the strength of the linkage. Check that the strongest links are consistent, with the business or the organisation.

Histograms are usually drawn on each node, for Number of Calls, the Total Call Duration and the Average Call Duration. These can be used to gauge the type of calls made and ascertain if better and more cost-effective communication methods should be used.

Always draw histograms, as it gives a deeper insight.

The simple Daisy Chart outlined is just a start. It makes you think about your network, people and business.

But how can Daisy be used to investigate further?

1. Daisy can aggregate and summarise a database in many ways. In addition to the totalling and averaging, maxima, minima, counts and ranges can all be evaluated, displayed and graphed.

2. Daisy makes an ideal problem finding and reporting system. Here, for example, the unique graphical display makes it easy to identify nodes with large numbers of long duration calls.

3. As Daisy can display all of the records and links associated with a node or selection of nodes, it is easy to establish why and who is responsible for the calls. Just click on the node and all will be revealed. This data can be sorted, printed, totalled, averaged and even dropped into another copy of Daisy, so you can do further analysis on the selected subset.

4. Daisy can take a database and draw a separate Daisy Chart for each value of a particular field. Here you might split by day of the week to see if each day had a distinctive pattern, with specific characteristics.

5. Each Daisy Chart has a characteristic pattern, that will be similar, each day, week or month, provided that the underlying data is the same.

   If your business changes, then the chart will change and often dramatically, giving a warning of the unexpected, whether caused by a problem or even an improvement. Daisy can also incorporate previous answers as node values and histograms, giving further indications of trends.

6. Surveys have shown that very few companies check and analyse the use of FAX.

   Daisy can analyse a log of FAX calls, either from a call logger or a computer FAX program, so that the right usage philosophy can be developed.

7. With the right equipment, Daisy can be used to plot incoming calls, showing from where they originated and the time before they were answered.