A regional emergency centre moves to next-generation call handling without a day of downtime
Regional emergency communications centre
A centre answering emergency calls for several municipalities was running a legacy telephony switch beside a separate dispatch system, with text-to-911 handled on a third screen. We replaced all three with Keryx Core, Call, and Dispatch — migrating live traffic in stages so no call taker ever worked a shift on a system they had not trained on.
0
minutes of downtime
across nine months of staged migration, including final cutover
3 → 1
screens per call taker
telephony, dispatch, and text now one workstation
−38%
call-to-dispatch time
median, measured over the first full quarter on Keryx
i3
compliance ahead of deadline
connected to the state ESInet before the regulator's date
The situation
The centre took roughly a hundred thousand emergency calls a year across a mixed estate: a selective router feeding a telephony switch installed a decade earlier, a dispatch system from a different vendor, and a text-to-911 client bolted on when the state mandated it. Each ran on its own screen, with its own login, and each held part of the incident record. Call takers re-typed addresses from the phone system into dispatch. Text conversations were logged separately and reconciled by hand.
The state's ESInet was live and the regulator had set a date for i3 compliance. The centre's leadership had two constraints that ruled out a conventional forklift replacement: they could not close the room for a cutover weekend, and they could not ask a team already short-staffed to learn three new systems at once.
What we did
- 01
Map the room before touching it
Two weeks on the floor observing shifts, recording every hand-off between screens, and building a workflow map with the call takers themselves. The map became the acceptance criteria: the new system had to remove hand-offs, not relocate them.
- 02
Core first, invisibly
Keryx Core was deployed alongside the legacy switch and connected to the ESInet, initially receiving a mirror of live traffic with no operator exposure. Routing, location handling, and failover were tuned against real calls for six weeks before a single call taker saw the new interface.
- 03
One position at a time
Keryx Call replaced the legacy console one workstation at a time, starting with volunteers on quiet shifts. Each converted position could fall back to legacy in one action. Training happened at the position, with a coach beside the call taker, rather than in a classroom.
- 04
Dispatch joins the same record
Once every position was on Call, Keryx Dispatch replaced the separate dispatch system. Because both read the same incident record, the re-typing stopped the day Dispatch went live — the record simply carried across.
- 05
Legacy switched off, not out
The legacy switch and dispatch system ran in standby for ninety days after full cutover, then were decommissioned. Nobody used the fallback in that window.
“We never had a cutover. One morning the last old console was gone and nobody had noticed when it happened. That is exactly what we asked for.”
— Director of Emergency Communications, Regional emergency communications centre
Solutions used
Built with
Start with what Keryx Core could do for you.
Tell us about your situation and we will walk you through it against this engagement — what carries over, what is different, and what to expect.