Customer Successes:
Bell Canada
"With JReport, we can now analyze 9-1-1 emergency transaction data to ensure accuracy and precisely route emergency aid when and where it is needed." – Francis Bourgault, Security Manager, Bell Canada

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Company Overview

Bell Canada is the largest communications company in Canada, with over 13 million local access telephone lines serving most of eastern Canada. Bell Canada is committed to providing their residential and business customers with simplicity, value, and convenience in their phone service. The company continually invests in technology to stay ahead of the curve, enabling their wire line and wireless networks to carry far more data and voice traffic than any of their competitors.

Business Challenge

Bell Canada's commitment to its customers includes offering the security and fast emergency response inherent to a 9-1-1 system. First implemented in 1994, Bell Canada's 9-1-1 emergency service is currently deployed to the Quebec, Ontario, and New Brunswick provinces. Bell's 9-1-1 system required a dedicated telecommunications network to be set up in conjunction with municipal governments. In addition, a number of databases and processes were set up to ensure the service functioned as designed. For example, when a call comes in to Bell Canada's 9-1-1 center, the system access a database that contains all of Bell Canada's local line information and automatically displays the caller's address and phone number. Based on the caller's address, the system accesses its Public Safety Answering Points data and intelligently routes the call to the appropriate emergency response center. The ready availability of caller and response center data ensures emergency aid can be dispatched even if the caller is unable to speak. The integrity of Bell Canada's customer database is of paramount importance in ensuring the system works correctly and emergency service is delivered as quickly as possible. To address both accuracy and efficiency, Bell Canada recently introduced Logicos – a proprietary data platform that facilitates report generation and ensures system and database updates occur regularly.

With Logicos deployed to a limited area, Bell Canada could proactively troubleshoot the 9-1- 1 system by identifying potential call routing difficulties. A data analyst at Bell Canada would generate small SQL requests on a local server that returned subscriber address data. The analyst would then examine this data – confirming address and appropriate emergency center – to determine if a call from any particular subscriber's phone number would be routed correctly. This system allowed Bell Canada to identify data anomalies, such as incorrect addresses or postal codes that did not exist, and to correct that data before any call routing mishap occurred. The manual reporting function of Logicos was sufficient for a small region and for just a few internal users.

However, as the 9-1-1 service expanded and more lines were added, the workload required to constantly manage subscriber line data and ensure call routing accuracy became more intensive and less manageable, while the importance of effectively managing and verifying the accuracy of this information became more critical. Because the manual querying and reporting capabilities of Logicos could not scale easily as millions of local access lines were being added to the 9-1-1 system, it became more and more difficult to monitor and update myriad data like new addresses, change of addresses, and change of Public Safety Answering Points.

In addition, manually generating reports on rapidly growing amounts of data was timeconsuming and labor intensive for Bell Canada. As their 9-1-1 service area grew, additional analysts were required to generate and analyze reports. The need for a more robust system to generate reports was clear so that Bell Canada could regularly gauge system effectiveness and update data as needed.

Because developing their own reporting application was too resource intensive, Bell decided to partner with a reporting tool vendor to replace their manual reporting solution with a more effective and efficient system. Leveraging their existing investment in Logicos was extremely important, so Bell Canada needed a solution that could easily integrate without significant customization and professional service demands. The system also had to scale in tandem with Bell's growth, to allow for increasing amounts of data to access, increasing numbers of reports to generate, and increasing numbers of concurrent users.

The JReport Solution

Bell Canada evaluated reporting solutions from Crystal Decisions and Jinfonet. "JReport was the best choice for us," says Francis Bourgault, security manager for Bell Canada's 9-1-1 emergency service. "JReport integrated easier, scaled better, and was easier to customize than any of the other solutions we considered."

Seamlessly integrated as a servlet within Bell Canada's 9-1-1 emergency system, JReport is used to generate daily transaction reports and to deliver those results to data analysts via the web. Reports may contain up to 50 pages of transaction data, including call data, call location, and routing information.

As this transaction data is analyzed, Bell Canada is able to identify bad information, like incorrect addresses, that could result in misrouting emergency calls and delays in emergency response times.

Benefits

JReport delivered on its promise of scalability and ease of integration immediately. With little training, Bell Canada deployed JReport enterprise-wide and designed over 50 reports to improve data collection and analysis. Over time, the system has scaled to over 200 users accessing over 180 reports daily, and Bell Canada expects continued growth as they build market share and add additional local access lines.

Depending on the particular user's needs, JReport generates transaction reports in any of several different formats. For quick views of data, Bell Canada outputs reports in HTML or PDF format. For more detailed analysis and in order to modify data errors and create a log of modifications, Bell Canada uses JReport to output data in Excel format. Bell Canada says most reports are generated in just a matter of a few seconds, saving time and enabling Bell Canada to correct bad data as quickly as possible to help improve public safety.

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