Dutch Railways Automates Incident Registration System

NS Hispeed is the company behind the high-speed train in the Netherlands.

Dutch Railway’s Product Control Department is responsible for managing any disruptions to the train’s schedule and registering them in an incident registration system. The current standalone system was manually operated and error-prone.

With limited incident report criteria, the system did not provide sufficient detail of each incident. These issues resulted in subpar reporting and performance analytics and made it difficult to determine steps to improve the process.

In order to analyze trends and measure performance accurately, the rail operator would need correct, detailed, and timely information.

In an ongoing effort to improve the efficiency of the incident reporting process and improve customer satisfaction, a new incident reporting application became a high priority for the organization. Dutch Railways needed the new system to be up and running within 6 months of their initial Request for Proposal.

Solution

Dutch Railways selected Mendix’s low-code development platform and Capgemini following an extensive selection and proof-of-concept process.

A small team of two business engineers built the first version of the new incident registration system in just two months.

At the same time they integrated it with an external Traffic Management System, provided by ProRail, a government organization that maintains the national railway network infrastructure.

Integration with the new Incident Registration System exposes key traffic information from ProRail to Dutch Railway’s data warehouse.

Employees are now able to efficiently and accurately report incidents and disruptions to train traffic in a user friendly way. And managers can analyze incident information, performance metrics and trends.

Results

It took the small team of two Capgemini consultants only 8 weeks to build the application with Mendix’s application platform including integration with other systems and complex business logic containing over 400 function points.

The result is an automated, user friendly workflow for incident registration along with reporting and analytics for improved management visibility.

The team is also counting in the inherent flexibility of Mendix to continuously modify and adapt the application as requirements evolve.

Based on the results and speed of delivery Dutch Railways is already considering additional projects using the same approach and the Mendix platform.