atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information Ratio lines per sets

What do you all set a proper ratio of lines versus employees on a system (not a call center )
i was contracted to install a mics with 2 pri 46
channels for about 100 sets now this is a community health center but to me it sounds like a lot of lines i am wondering if i could run this on 1 pri.
Thanks for your inputs

Going to move this to "General" In answer to your question, it would depend on the needs of the customer.

Bill is correct in my opinion. I have clients with 10 phones and 8 lines and it's not enough, and a doctors office with 30 phones and 6 lines and it's plenty. You can get your dial tone provider to do a useage study that gives you busy pegs. It tells how many times a caller gets a busy signal calling your number and at what time of the day. Usually done over a billing cycle and I don't know if they charge for it. That's the best determination of need. That and the client complaining of not being able to get an outside line.
Mark

2 PRIs seem about right to me. There are several questions you can ask yourself:

1. There are 100 phones---what are the chances of one/half of the phones being used at one time. That's two PRIs.

2. How many employees (that use the phones)?? If there are only 10 employees--then there's no way that even 1 PRI would be used to its' limits---but even with 10 employees--if you had an eight port voice mail--then all of a sudden the capacity of the one PRI would be taxed. If you had a system that regularly put 6-8 call on hold or in park---then, again---1 PRI would be taxed.
If you have about 100 empoyees----well, then there's another story.

You have to design a system to take care of MOST of the times during the day--even the busiest. You don't want to design a system for Sunday morning at 10:00am--there's probably not too much traffic then.

So---there's no right answer. But in this case, I'd stick with 2 PRIs --but depending on how many employees, extra traffic, type of use---be prepared to expand. Just my $.02

can they tell me on pri the average incoming calls as well

since you are using PRI's (any trung group actually) your provider can probally provide you a traffic study for a set period of time. It may be billable from some providers but It will tell you how much trafic was on the trunk group for any given time and it useually breaks it down to 15 minute intervals.

The answer to "Do I need more lines" is usually the same as "Do you ever try to call out and can't get a line?"

To determine if there are too many lines, check the phone bills. Usually, they are broken out by phone number, and will show outbound calls on that number. By cross-referencing with your LCR or ARS tables, you should be able to determine if lines can be removed, and which ones.

Before calling the Telco and having lines cancelled, remove them from programming and wait a couple of weeks. If you have no reports of lost calls or "external busy," then it's probably safe to remove the lines from service.

You can also do a peg count, but unless you're up on erlangs and centicall-seconds, I'd stick to the more pedestrian route.

Another slick trick: Turn on inbound and outbound SMDR and send the output to a printer. Cross-reference the report against the trunk list / LCR tables.

For reference, as a general rule, in my experience:

Stock-broker/Call-center or high volume of calls:
3/1 or 4/1 is a reasonable ratio, 5/1 may be acceptable.

Hotel/Motel or very low call volume:
10/1, 12/1 is probably about right; you can sometimes go as low as 20/1.

thats great input i might disable one pri and see the results for a couple of days

If you're not sure, just disable 8 or 12 channels, if nobody complains, then disable the whole thing.