Transforming a state-owned railway company with Capgemini’s ADMnext

Client Challenges: A major railway company was looking to evolve on several fronts in order to improve customer service, productivity, and competitiveness – all while maintaining business stability and complying with local laws during the transition

Solution: A comprehensive DevOps and Application Services portfolio management and innovation transformation. Capgemini’s ADMnext delivers with Agile@scale, Design Office, and Business Process Focus (BPF)

Benefits:

• Average application uptime improved
• Time-to-market drastically reduced
• Reduced SDLC from an average of nine to three months
• 33 Proof of Concepts (POCs), with 18 innovation-related projects already implemented
• Boosted customer satisfaction and the efficiency of many business processes
• Incidents related to downtime were reduced to zero

Continuously remaining relevant, fostering business stability, and evolving in a shifting, fast-paced industry

While customer expectations are always high – regardless of the industry or market – transportation draws particular scrutiny. Trains directly and massively affect the daily lives of passengers, meaning that any company operating railways must prepare for even higher expectations than usual. As a result, a state-owned railway company understood that it needed to continue evolving its business in order to remain competitive with private organizations.

This need became especially acute when the government opened freight travel to private businesses, meaning that the company had even greater competition than before. In order to remain relevant, the organization needed to rapidly innovate and create a modern customer experience to meet rising expectations, all the while abiding mandatory guidelines and compliance requirements.

Revamping the customer experience with ADMnext

In order to improve customer satisfaction, and remain relevant as a leading rail service provider, it was crucial for the client to analyze existing processes, identify challenges and areas for improvement, and speed up the entire process by introducing innovative solutions.

This is where Capgemini stepped in to help. Building on a successful 14-year partnership on a number of transformation, automation, and innovation initiatives, Capgemini embarked on an Agile/DevOps transformation program. This program enabled the railway organization services to better support its business activities, along with automation and business process improvement solutions to reduce errors, improve efficiencies, and speed up operations. Finally, given the strict mandatory guidelines and compliance requirements it was mandated to meet, Capgemini helped the company establish a structured way of generating innovation.

Agile/DevOps Transformation

Capgemini worked with the client to develop an Agile framework, which was introduced in 2013. Encouraged by the results, it is being scaled across the client’s organization. Today, 50% of all new enhancements and applications being developed use Agile ways of working. This has meant that time to market has been considerably reduced. Moreover, to allay the client’s concern about variable pricing, Capgemini moved from a fixed-price waterfall approach to a fixed-price Agile approach, with prices being fixed based on the backlogs for each sprint.

Automation and business-focused services

Capgemini’s automation efforts began with implementing automation for the client’s existing ticketing application. Since then, Capgemini has automated a number of critical functions, all of which helped eliminate errors, improve the time to process requests, and enable new functionalities. The result of these efforts was a markedly better customer experience.

Over time, service delivery has been structured to bring in greater business focus through implementing Capgemini’s Business Process Focus (BPF). BPF is a key element in Capgemini’s ADMnext, defining technical issues and outcomes in terms of business metrics. This helped create real-time KPIs to track the business impact of different processes, enabling easier identification of problem areas and remedial steps that needed to be taken.

Innovating and digitizing the entire passenger experience with Capgemini ADMnext’s Design Office

Capgemini ADMnext’s structured innovation program, Design Office, has helped develop a number of innovative applications and processes. Design Office brings together teams from Capgemini and the client, and has dedicated investment to ensure a smooth flow of innovation – independent of the existing delivery contract. Through Design Office, Capgemini leverages its Applied Innovation Exchanges (AIEs) and Accelerated Solution Environments (ASEs) in order to help introduce cutting-edge solutions and industry-leading technologies.

This program has helped the team develop a number of innovative applications such as:

• VisioGuichet – An application for Skype videos in ticket vending machines
• Mobileo – An application for mobile ticket booking
• 30minutesmax – An application that enables client selling teams to deal with major crowds in the vending space of railway stations
• APE – An application for cash payments
• RegioScan – An application for passenger security scanning

The benefits from all of these initiatives are clear to see:

• Time-to-market drastically reduced
• Average application uptime was improved with SAFe, DevOps, Design Office, and portfolio management
• Multiple transformation programs executed with zero disruptions of ongoing business operations
• With Agile@scale for approximately 50% of enhancements and new applications, Capgemini reduced SDLC from an average of nine to three months
• Design Office helped generate 33 Proof of Concepts (POCs), with 18 innovation-related projects already implemented
• BPF also identified and improved faulty process areas – improving customer satisfaction and the efficiency of many business processes
• Services were delivered per a fixed price model, despite the transition to Agile.

The road ahead with ADMnext

As of now, 50% of client projects are utilizing Agile, while the remaining are waterfall. Capgemini is aiming to increase this number to 75% and currently has seven Agile teams working with the client, assisting them in this transformation. Key areas where Capgemini intends to work with the client to further the transformation journey include:

• Moving IT systems to the cloud using Platform as a Service (PaaS) as the base
• Further optimizing time to market with DevOps
• Replacement of the client’s legacy systems.