ProRail Revitalizes Information Management With WebFOCUS

Dutch Railway Keeps Operations On Track With Enterprise Reporting

Government agencies must provide reliable services to citizens while maintaining a certain level of profitability. Successful agencies are run like businesses, with a focus on optimizing efficiency, streamlining internal processes, and keeping an eye on the bottom line.

As the sole caretaker of the Dutch railway infrastructure, ProRail has proven how much a government task organization can benefit from consistent business management. With 4,000 employees throughout the Netherlands, ProRail’s primary task involves managing the maintenance and extension of all Dutch national railways. This includes traffic control, the allocation of railway capacity, and ensuring that the infrastructure is safe and available to the public. The organization processes huge amounts of data about everything from track maintenance to traffic jams.

In 2004, ProRail installed Information Builders WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform into the organization’s information infrastructure. Since then, the Dutch railway has extended analytical and query capabilities to hundreds of people throughout its national operation, and is speeding forward in its efforts to create a cohesive, enterprise-wide BI environment.

A Direct Route to Cohesive Analysis

With hundreds of entrenched legacy systems, ProRail had amassed a wide range of reporting environments to propagate and share information with management. Management determined that staff members could save time and simplify the organization’s enterprise software environment by standardizing on one capable BI tool that could present information from disparate systems through one cohesive interface.

“We initially wanted to retrieve management information from 350 different legacy systems, including Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, and the other databases that we had at the time,” recalls Timo Berkenbosch, ProRail’s business intelligence competence center manager. “We couldn’t easily obtain information from those sources, let alone combine data for reporting or analysis.”

Berkenbosch and other IT professionals researched solutions from vendors such as Cognos, Microsoft, SAP, Business Objects, and Information Builders. WebFOCUS was selected because it was powerful enough to handle large quantities of data from many different systems and departments, and was also well integrated with geographic information system (GIS) technology from Information Builders’ partner, ESRI.

“None of the other BI tools had such complete or sophisticated GIS integration,” says Berkenbosch. “We rely on geographical information every day, so we wanted to be able to visualize maintenance information on a series of maps.”

ProRail hired Information Builders Professional Services to help build an initial batch of reports. Once these reports were complete, they moved on to weekly and monthly reports. Before long, ProRail was on track to establish WebFOCUS as an enterprise-wide BI standard.

ProRail now has nearly two dozen sophisticated WebFOCUS applications that bring different types of data into one location for reporting. The most popular applications combine information about traffic management, rail maintenance, and traffic operations with several related business domains.

To help direct these ambitious BI initiatives, ProRail established a business intelligence competency center to handle everything from information analysis to testing. The competency center has 12 employees and 15 consultants to develop and test WebFOCUS reports. Approximately 100 internal users and 50 outside users depend upon these reports, and a few hundred more use the BI applications.

The company also has several expert users who perform complex analyses of the data using the WebFOCUS tools. There are ten “three-click users,” as the company calls them, who use parameterized WebFOCUS forms to select data and conduct complex analyses – all with just three mouse clicks.

Making Time With Superior BI Technology

One of ProRail’s most popular reports is the RailFocus application, a configuration management portal that offers insight into all rail infrastructure elements. Five hundred registered users access the system each month to determine when specific tracks were maintained, how much a particular track has cost, how many trains have passed through a region, what type of soil is beneath the tracks, and other critical information.

The 6,500 kilometers of railways in the Netherlands are some of the most frequently used in the world. RailFocus helps maintenance personnel monitor the rails, overhead contact wires, bridges, viaducts, and level crossings, allowing them to prioritize which sections of the railway require maintenance and determine the most expedient way to perform these improvements. By comparing benchmarks in the RailFocus application, they can also identify cost drivers throughout the railway system.

Another WebFOCUS application, the Traffic Information System, combines data about the individual trains, companies, schedules, tracks, stations, freights, and more to reveal key operational metrics that assist in improving the safety of the railway system. For instance, if there were an accident, ProRail staff would know instantly – based upon the information about the train’s freight stored in this system – whether the fire department could use water to extinguish any flames, or if that might accelerate the fire.

WebFOCUS works with ESRI technology to display information spatially, letting ProRail view and analyze pertinent data within the context of a physical location. Users can click from a report to a map and back, viewing the impact of specific business decisions on a geographical display. This organization of information enables management to see how business decisions affect each sector of the infrastructure.

The IT department is also using iWay DataMigrator and iWay adapters to extract, transform, and load (ETL) data from production systems into an Oracle data mart containing traffic and maintenance information. WebFOCUS also accesses SAP financial information with help from the iWay SAP Adapter, which connects BI users to ProRail’s primary SAP system via Microsoft BizTalk Server.

A Cost-Effective BI Journey

By drilling down into maintenance expenditures, ProRail is reducing costs through better anticipation of the needs of the organization. For instance, since nighttime maintenance is more expensive than maintenance done during the day, ProRail can lower costs by carefully scheduling its preventive maintenance. The government and train company clients can opt for less expensive ways to allocate the €1.3 billion spent each year on railway maintenance, leaving more of the organization’s budget available to invest in new tracks.

“The maintenance department can create separate strategies for different switches, tailoring the maintenance strategy to emphasize the tracks which are more important,” says Martin Zoontjens, IT manager for ProRail. “As a result, the availability of the track goes up, which raises the profitability of the organization.”

WebFOCUS also helps ensure that the tracks are running well, which is both a practical and a budgetary concern, since ProRail receives government funds based upon how many switches are working. To maximize uptime for its infrastructure, maintenance personnel use WebFOCUS to alert them to the need for preventive maintenance.

The organization’s revenue is based upon performance – including infrastructure availability, customer satisfaction, safety, delays, station cleanliness, and other information collected from surveys – so this type of reporting is highly useful to ProRail. WebFOCUS has made ProRail more efficient, particularly important now that the company has a financial incentive to perform well. By monitoring these key performance indicators (KPIs), they ensure that their budget from the government will be secure.

“Another goal is to create alternative options between different regions within the Netherlands, with sidetracks that offer a less expensive option than the main tracks,” says Zoontjens. “In order to optimize these prices, we have to identify our cost drivers. WebFOCUS enables us to find and analyze the relevant information to make decisions based upon these factors.”

Traveling Further With WebFOCUS

ProRail’s IT department plans to implement WebFOCUS Performance Management Framework (PMF) to measure and track the performance of different strategies designed to help the organization achieve its goals. From scorecard capabilities to real-time analytics, PMF has a variety of uses that can be easily implemented, customized, and scaled to fit ProRail’s specific needs.

The organization also expects to expand its active user base to 1,000 people across the enterprise. To help achieve this goal, and to encourage staff members to use WebFOCUS in broader ways, it is expanding its use of WebFOCUS InfoAssist as an end-user reporting tool and using WebFOCUS ReportCaster to distribute daily reports via e-mail.

ProRail plans to use iWay DataMigrator to migrate traffic information into data marts and data warehouses, while iWay Service Manager will be tasked with managing the transformation and movement of data from several different types of applications and databases into the Oracle data warehouse.applications/prorail