Bull to design and build Business Intelligence (BI) solution for the city of Toulouse that instantaneously monitors polling trends

The city of Toulouse now has a solution – designed in collaboration with Bull – that instantaneously monitors polling trends

Paris, 16-6-2014 — /EuropaWire/ — Bull has been chosen by the city of Toulouse to design and build a Business Intelligence (BI)1 solution suited to the challenges of modern elections. With Bull as its Business Intelligence partner, the Information Systems Research and Applications Department at the Toulouse city authority has developed a tool for processing and consolidating votes cast in elections. Its first outing was at the recent municipal poll. The solution enables election count results from the city’s 249 polling stations to be uploaded and disseminated in real-time, instantly providing trends for the election results.

The fourth largest city in France, Toulouse is the biggest one that is not divided into electoral districts, where parallel counting speeds up the publication of results. This means it is among the last areas in the country to publish the outcome of the polls on voting night. But the candidates, the government and the media are all very eager to get electoral data in real time.

The new application retrieves data from various sources (election results as they are in progress, data on turnout and votes cast, historical data on past elections…), gathers it together into an info-center, and then feeds it into the official procedure including controlled publication of the results. Established by the Ministry of the Interior, the regulatory procedure requires the uploading of turnout data throughout the day, the automated transmission of results to the prefecture and the publication of certified reports for countersignature.

The tool also responds to the demand – both from the city authorities and the public – for information to be published before the final numbers are established. For every hundred ballot papers counted, the offices communicate the incomplete results.

Real-time dashboards detail the trends, based on the weighted interim results. To avoid misinterpretation, the formatting of these results is adapted to the target audience: the general public, press and municipal decision makers. When cross-referenced with the city’s Geographic Information System (GIS), the data can also be viewed on a map. Finally, data flows are used to transmit the final results to the media as they come in

According to Michel Rapatel, Head of the Information Systems Research and Applications Department at the Toulouse city authority: “The Bull team has used its combination of technical skills, rigour and responsiveness to first assimilate the specific characteristics of the electoral process, and then to strengthen system performance between the two rounds of the election. We now have a real-time business intelligence solution that meets today’s needs for information.”

Developed with the help of Bull, there has to be no room for error with this application, despite the difficulty of full-scale testing. For the 2014 round of municipal, legislative and European elections it not only rose to this challenge, but even with the results from only 73 electoral wards in, it was already showing results that proved to be 0.5% accurate.

1 Business intelligence (BI) refers to computer systems that manage the resources, tools and methods of collecting, consolidating, modeling and restoring the tangible and intangible data that organizations use to support decision-making and give decision makers an overview of the relevant activity.

About Bull
Bull is the trusted partner for enterprise data. The Group, which is firmly established in the Cloud and in Big Data, integrates and manages high-performance systems and end-to-end security solutions. Bull’s offerings enable its customers to process all the data at their disposal, creating new types of demand. Bull converts data into value for organisations in a completely secure manner.

Bull currently employs around 9,200 people across more than 50 countries, with over 700 staff totally focused on R&D. In 2013, Bull recorded revenues of €1.3 billion.

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Contact
Bull
Aurélie Negro
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E-mail: aurelie.negro@bull.net