Bell Canada

CGI and Project Omega Assist in Bell Sympatico’s High-Speed Customer Handling

“We collaborated in a framework that overdelivered and truly delighted our customers. The business value was easily quantifiable and glaringly obvious to all.”

Nick Manocchio, Director, CRM Development, Bell Canada

Bell Canada is Canada's largest supplier of telecommunications services. With one of the world’s most robust and reliable public switched networks, Bell Canada provides advanced voice, data and image communications to more than eight million business and residence customers across Canada.

The Challenge
When Bell launched a promotional campaign for its high-speed Sympatico Internet service, it was overwhelmed by the success of the initiative. In fact, the promotion generated so many new subscribers that Bell found itself facing considerable order backlogs.

Enter Project Omega as a solution. CGI felt that Project Omega would provide a platform upon which projects could leverage the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) infrastructure to access Bell's legacy systems with mechanized order processing and data retrieval from non-integrated sales and service channels. With the first release of Omega, Bell sought to electronically submit service requests directly into the Bell Canada service ordering system, which would eliminate the existing manual data entry process. This would facilitate the provisioning of the network access for High Speed Internet users.

The Strategy
CGI also saw an opportunity to invest through its Strategic Investment Program in Vitria technology training and a laboratory, to further develop its expertise in EAI offerings. “CGI was proactive in quickly creating a Vitria lab,” stated Nick Manocchio, Bell’s Director, CRM Development. “Because of this, the people working on the project were highly effective.”

Bell used a rapid application design (RAD) to develop the business and system requirement specifications parallel to the work being done by the CGI team. CGI designed and architected the overall solution for Omega. Because the development methodology was iterative, the whole process helped to compress time and to enable the combined team to deliver the solution within a very short time frame. “CGI and Bell worked closely together, operating very much as a single team throughout the entire Omega project,” explained Nick.

Standardized, reusable information and ordering services were created that can be accessed and integrated from any Bell Canada Holdings sales channel to enable enhanced customer dialogues and automated order creation capabilities.

CGI leveraged its expertise in systems integration and project management by: providing the technical infrastructure, setting up test environments, executing tests, providing Vitria BusinessWare development and support. CGI also provided order management expertise, deployment management, production readiness, EAI prototyping, help for removing roadblocks and resolving critical issues to ensure overall project success.

• Omega leverages the EAI capabilities of Vitria BusinessWare in conjunction with generic legacy business services utilizing technologies such as Unix – Sun Solaris, Windows NT, Microsoft Transaction Server, MS SQL Server, Oracle 8.0, COM, XML, Visual Basic, Java, MVS, SNA and LU6.2.

The Results
Within two weeks, the backlog was entirely cleared, and Bell was able to handle new orders on a normal daily basis. By early 2002, volumes had already surpassed those forecasted for 2003.

Thanks to a concerted team effort, Bell was able to realize a four-fold productivity improvement and eliminate the dual entry of customer order information. Bell also benefited from an average 80% increase in order flow-through improvement. The Omega project has delivered more functionality than expected, helping order flow-through and the automation of other front-end work, for example. Omega also creates foundational e-business capability. In addition, the whole Omega framework as a back-end solution was built to be reusable in other areas of the infrastructure and can be expanded to facilitate flow-through of different business events.

“During the Omega project, my partners at CGI definitely demonstrated a keen willingness to experiment with RAD delivery models that fit with the imperatives facing Bell Canada,” concluded Nick. “We collaborated in a framework that overdelivered and truly delighted our customers. The business value was easily quantifiable and glaringly obvious to all.”