Pacific Bell Maintains Low Profile for Billing Center

It’s there, and Dick Africano knows it’s there. So do 590 other Pacific Bell employees who work in the featureless industrial building.

But few of Pacific Bell’s 4.5 million customers in Southern California know it’s there.

And Africano, area manager of Pacific Bell’s Cost Recording Information Systems, wants to keep it that way.

The reason is that the Anaheim facility, Pacific Bell’s Southern California billing center, contains almost 20,000 magnetic tapes that store critical billing information for 70% of the state’s telephone customers--information that includes a record of the past month’s telephone activity for each customer.

“The tapes are our lifeblood,” said Africano. “Without them, we cannot bill accurately. And without the telephone bills, we’re out of business.”

That’s why the building is anonymous, said Gary Alpert, manager of the regional bill processing department--a sign-less concrete tilt-up in an industrial park full of other anonymous concrete buildings.

“Otherwise, we’d be more subject to--well, maybe terrorism’s not the right word . . .” Alpert said.

Security at the facility is about the same as at other places where sensitive data is processed, Alpert said. The building is monitored 24 hours a day by two-member security teams who register visitors, tag them with special identification badges and maintain an elaborate security system that utilizes magnetic cards to open doors to the building’s computer rooms.

In those rooms are the tapes--some in large reels and the newer ones in cassettes that resemble eight-track audio cartridges--that hold the company’s confidential data on customers. Each tape contains from eight to 24 hours of customer toll calls--representing up to $250,000 in telephone bills, Alpert said.

The tapes are delivered by truck to the Anaheim facility from service centers all over Southern California. Personnel in Anaheim then extract from the tapes information such as time, date and charge for every non-local call.

Behind the building’s unmarked doors lies an assortment of computer, printing and envelope-stuffing equipment that spits out two billing pages per second and prepares about 245,000 bills in a 14-hour production cycle, Africano said. The equipment runs through 20 such cycles every month, cranking out 4.5 million completed bills.

Cut Costs Sharply

Relocating the billing preparation and mailing facilities from their previously separate locations in Orange and Van Nuys cost about $300,000. But by reducing shipping and handling costs and consolidating its work force, Pacific Bell has cut costs by nearly $18 million in the three years since the two operations have been combined at the Anaheim site, according to a spokesman for the company.

Two other bill-handling operations still exist outside of Anaheim: Customers’ names and addresses are added to the computer tapes at a facility in Irvine, and customers’ payments are received, counted and banked from a phone company office complex in Van Nuys.

Van Nuys also used to be the postmark on bills that customers received, and Africano said a surprisingly larger number of customers have noticed and called the company about the change to an “Atwood” postmark. Atwood is an unincorporated county area whose U.S. Post Office is the nearest to the Anaheim operation.

Aside from the changes in locale and postmark, Pacific Bell’s bills have taken on a change in appearance. Beginning late last month, the familiar, half-page bills gave way to 7-by-11-inch sheets similar to some credit card bills. Pacific Bell customers in Northern California began receiving the new kind of bills last month and have had about 15% fewer questions about their charges, phone company officials said.

Simulated Bills

Before adopting the new format, the Anaheim production facility did a dry run of 1 million simulated bills. A staff of 80 operates the printing and postal preparation system, which includes five envelope-stuffing machines that resemble compact mechanized assembly lines.

The production facility includes an extremely rapid printing process in which a magnetic image of the billing information is electronically imprinted on each page. A special ink then is sprayed across each page, adhering only to the magnetized areas, to form the printed numbers and letters. Five such printers spit out 14,000 lines per minute, two pages per second, 172,800 pages a day, Africano said.

The bills then are sorted, doing work normally dones by postal employees. That saves Pacific Bell $2.7 million in postal costs annually, Africano said. Still, the Anaheim facility spends about $15 million on postage alone each year.

The postal service picks up four loads of mail each day, all scheduled for next-day delivery, including the final daily shipment of 18,000 notices for delinquent customers scheduled to have their services discontinued if they don’t pay.

Each month, hundreds and hundreds of cardboard boxes full of individual bills go out from the Anaheim office. But perhaps the most astounding billing work that the center does is mailed to only 500 or so of its customers--large corporations or a federal government agency: Each of those bills takes up one box and requires anywhere from 7,000 to 10,000 pages.