ProRail Delivers Reliable Transportation with Low-Code Automation

ProRail’s mission is simple – to ensure passenger and freight rail travel in the Netherlands is high-quality, safe, on time, and convenient. In practice, however, ProRail’s mission is logistically challenging, requiring the company to maintain a high-quality workforce, using high-quality systems.

The company is organized into three infrastructure management organizations, tasked with:

  • Maintaining physical rail infrastructure
  • Planning railway allocation 52 hours in advance
  • Preparing traffic control 52 hours in advance

“There is often more demand than there is track capacity,” says Johan van der Linde, ICT Manager at ProRail. “And IT is responsible for the processes that enable our railway network to operate properly.”

For example, while planning railway allocation and traffic control, ProRail will send the capacity to NS, a company responsible for the operation of trainsets, who will then set availability expectations with their customers, accordingly.

These intricate calculations are maintained by ProRail’s core systems, and a report on adherence to KPIs is submitted to the Dutch Government. If ProRail and NS do not meet these standards, they are fined.

Beyond these core responsibilities, ProRail constantly aims to rationalize its internal processes, creating a leaner, more efficient organization that spends its resources wisely.

Combatting Shadow IT

ProRail’s core systems operation is sophisticated and of extremely high importance to the Netherlands, requiring a substantial amount of IT oversight.

At the same time, the business at ProRail was constantly generating new ideas to create efficiencies in their processes, first asking IT for help solving these problems, and sometimes turning to third-party solutions. This situation was difficult – growing ProRail’s backlog and creating a proliferation of Shadow IT.

“The IT department had to have more influence on business processes,” said van der Linde.

ProRail needed a new way of developing applications, enabling Johan’s team, and IT as a whole, to build applications that were fast-to-market, first-time-right, and highly reliable in the office automation domain.

Technology Aligned to Business Goals

ProRail considered a number of options to address their growing backlog and proliferating of Shadow IT.

Off-the-shelf solutions were proposed, solving for particular business initiatives, but proved too expensive or insufficient.

“You often end up with a bunch of features you don’t need or use – a big waste of money,” commented van der Linde. The decision was made to seek an application platform – a foundation for ProRail to develop applications that were fine-tuned to solve for their own specific needs.

They decided to adopt the Mendix low-code development platform to achieve just that.

Johan’s team got to work quickly, and over the past five years, has built 37 applications on the platform, creating significant operational efficiency gains.

Risk Management & Contract Compliance

ProRail uses the “Performance Oriented Maintenance Contract” model when issuing contracts to the third-party organizations that work on the railway system, meaning that their contractors are held to important success KPIs. If the contractors do not complete their work according to KPIs, they are penalized by ProRail.

This application allows ProRail to provision these contracts in a uniform manner, confirming if work is done correctly, and better managing its expenses.

Workflow Management

To maintain the integrity of the Dutch railway system, ProRail has employees working 24 hours a day over 3 different shifts. Previously, shift workers responsible for the same tasks (like inspecting railway stations), would manually log their work on paper, leaving the paper for the next shift responsible.

The Work Management application allows ProRail employees to use their mobile device to enter their completed work for the day, transferring it to the next employee.

Project Oversight

ProRail is responsible for a significant amount of maintenance and new construction projects across the Dutch railway system. To properly plan and execute these projects, engineering consultants and architects are constantly creating and iterating upon technical drawings, all of which need to be organized.

The Plandix application manages these drawings, as well as their delivery timelines and associated engineers for all projects, integrating with the RIGD-LOXIA Railz system to ensure proper storage of these key artifacts.

This new approach to application development, working alongside the business and re-using functionality, has enabled ProRail and its IT team to significantly speed development and satisfy the business, all while creating significant operational efficiency gains.

A Recipe for Digital Transformation

The adoption of the Mendix platform has delivered multifaceted value to ProRail and its IT team.

“Projects are delivered more quickly now. We wowed the business with much shorter time to value, and have gotten IT even closer to the business, giving us quicker solutions,” said Johan. “We’ve been able to transfer a lot of our development from waterfall to SCRUM/Agile, and on to DevOps. The Mendix platform is helping us manage that transition.”

“Every development hour costs money. With the Mendix platform and an agile approach, we’ve been able to reduce the hours of development on our development projects by 5x.”

The Mendix platform alone, however, is not singularly responsible for ProRail’s IT successes. It took:

  • The right people, building a team of suppliers that were talented and solution-oriented.
  • The right process, transitioning a waterfall-centric development organization to an agile-first one.
  • The right app portfolio, building a relationship with business success-by-success to ensure that ideas are presented to internal IT, eliminating Shadow IT.

“Managing infrastructure is difficult, and pride in doing it well is in the culture and DNA of ProRail,” says van der Linde.

“We’ve been able to build an organization that solves these problems by looking at technology as an opportunity, not a threat. In my time of management my team was able to reduce the quantity of applications from 150 single applications to 105 from which 25 are running on a platform; this is a major rationalization in the infrastructure.”

With the right team, ambitions, mindset, and technology, ProRail’s IT team has turned a corner, and continues to deliver for their business colleagues and the citizens of the Netherlands.

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