October 15, 2012 --  BITĖ Group is one of the biggest international telecommunications groups in the Baltic countries. The group, which was set up in 2005, consists of BITĖ Lietuva operating in Lithuania since 1995 and BITE Latvija established in 2005. With its long-time experience in the dynamic telecommunications market, investments and professional team of employees, BITĖ Group is ready to ensure modern, high-quality and customer-friendly services for Latvian and Lithuanian customers. BITĖ realized benefits of the geographic information systems (GIS) for business long time ago, and is using GIS technology extensively for more than 10 years. GIS assists particularly, in daily work of the Network Department: in planning and optimizing network, planning network deployment work, analyzing customer behavior, for network management, etc.

Data exchange within the company and information sharing with service partners from outside is crucial for BITĖ. So, it is extremely important to ensure that both GIS and other enterprise information systems always have the correct data.

Implemented GIS has greatly facilitated the execution of the activities within the company, but working with outside companies, such as tower construction and maintenance companies or public institutions the communication was not effective. Data exchange between companies involved a lot of manual work.

BITĖ developed an idea to adapt the GIS to work with other organizations. However, the existing system turned to be  too difficult to apply in a way that it would be both safe and effective.

Then BITĖ appealed to Cellular Expert developers’ team from Hnit-Baltic - a long-term partner specializing in GIS for telecommunications. BITĖ asked Hnit-Baltic to change  the current system to Cellular Expert Server - the solution for wireless network engineering and planning, based on ArcGIS Server technology. The adoption of standard (COTS / out of the box) server solution seemed too complex for BITĖ. Company decided to leave the old system for daily activities and use the new one for new activities.

The first task for a new system was to implement “Electromagnetic Radiation Monitoring Web application”.

According to regulations, the construction of a new base station must be environmentally friendly, so the network operator must ensure that electromagnetic radiation does not exceed the allowable limits and cause no harm on human health. To obtain permission to use new base station BITĖ had to pass through a long and complicated procedure: depending on the amount and type of antennas installed, personnel from BITĖ had to make the map and select the measurement points; After that, prepare description of the measurement points and generate base station “hygiene certificate”. Then, an independent company had to come and perform measurements on the place. Measurement results were delivered to State Public Health Care Centre to get an approval for station use. This process required many manual operations and as a result, a high probability of errors occurred.  Sometimes measurers couldn’t gauge the radiation in the specified points, because of buildings and other terrain obstacles. So specialists from BITĖ had to select new points, and repeat the whole process. Specialists had to create the documents manually, check and correct for several times.

BITĖ wanted to solve this problem and make this process easier. Company preferred to get a simple user interface, the system that is easy to use and should not require special training. In addition, users’ authorization and data security issues were equally important.

New solution has coped with the challenges very well. The Cellular Expert development team launched the system for a pilot use in late 2011, and after several months improved it according to user feedback.

After implementation of new monitoring application the process, looks as follows: 1) specialists from BITĖ generate station “hygiene certificate” directly from the network data, (2) measurer from independent company previews the measurement points via online map, inputs measurement data on the spot and generates report, (3) manager from BITĖ delivers signed report to the State Public Health Care Centre. “Automatic creation of measurement reports with minimal manual editing of data – saves time and resources“, - says Povilas Stonys, Network Support Systems manager at BITĖ. “The only thing you need to do is sign a report, and that is brilliant”.

The new solution shortened Electromagnetic radiation monitoring process and enabled quicker data exchange between service partners. Monitoring application opened possibilities for BITĖ to generate new ideas, how to implement the same technology for other task solving. It was the basis for online profiling application, tower equipment report generation and other Cellular Expert solutions. But that’s another story...