Pacific Bell Keeps Low Profile at 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 the public at large--about 4.5 million Pacific Bell customers located between the Tehachapi Mountains and the Mexican border--doesn’t 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--a sign-less concrete tilt-up in an industrial park full of anonymous concrete buildings, said Gary Alpert, manager of the regional bill processing department.
“Otherwise, we’d be more subject to--well, maybe terrorism’s not the right word . . . ,” said Alpert, laughing as he searched for the right word, “ . . . an attack.”
Still, security at the facility is no different than at any other sensitive data processing center, 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 which 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.
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 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.
Although the first customers saw it only last month, Pacific Bell began testing the format in January. The impetus for a new style of bill came from AT&T;’s 1984 breakup and the resulting separation of billing information, which was difficult for many customers to understand, Alpert said.
“The new format wasn’t so much to save us time,” he said. “It’s to make the bill easier to read.”
Before adopting the new format, the Anaheim production facility did a dry run of one 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 test was successful and the system spit out a million bills, prepared them for mailing and printed “00 cents” postage on each envelope before the whole batch was dumped into a line of garbage bins and hauled away to be destroyed.
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 done 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 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 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.
