A new mobile app, ‘Seat Finder’, now advises passengers where to stand on the platform to maximize their chances of getting a seat when they board. This uses live data about passenger movement, CO2 levels, and a train’s load distribution, to provide real-time advice.

“Customers love the Seat Finder app,” Martijn says. “Sometimes there are a lot of people in the front of the train when the back of the train is half empty, so we combine rush hour crowd statistics with other data to identify how passengers are spread across the carriages.”

Live dashboards provide insight into the daily running of trains; information which teams can act on promptly to improve the experience for passengers. For example, one keeps track of the number of people at each station, so Dutch Railways can adapt carriage capacity to demand. Another shows delays and causes, to help plan for the next day’s services. A further dashboard helps plan the upkeep of trains to minimize disruption for travelers.

“We’ve created various reports in Power BI which provide current, detailed status information about our network and trains—a level of insight we didn’t have before, not to this degree of accuracy,” Martijn notes. “Now we can trust the data completely.”

When services run smoothly, customers experience the benefits immediately. It also reduces costs for Dutch Railways, as it better target resources like for example toilet water and optimized planning of logistic operations.

High-speed Travel to the Future

Dutch Railways can now roll out new service innovation quickly and efficiently too. Before, this was a long-winded process involving approvals, development, and delivery, taking months.

“In the cloud, with Azure, what we wanted was available within an hour,” Martijn says. “The reaction from everyone was, ‘Whoa! If this is just the beginning—if the cloud means there is no limit—we want to do this, and this for our traditional Business Intelligence and new types of Analytics using the same data fundament with solid data management!”

Dutch Railways is so excited by the potential for ‘analytics on demand’ that it is migrating more than 80 applications to Azure, and already tackling ambitious challenges, from crowd control to image recognition to combat graffiti on trains, to more personalized marketing.

Martijn believes Dutch Railways has found the key to the future in the cloud, and the ideal partner in Microsoft—which also takes care of data protection and security.

“Our goal is to be the best travel companion for our customers, to deliver the best reasonable train ticket price we can and this can’t be realized without data and AI, and Microsoft are undoubtedly the provider to help us deliver this.”

To maintain its status as the Netherland’s preferred national rail operator, Dutch Railways must honour its pledge to provide travellers with “a comfortable journey, in a clean train, with plenty of seating, that runs on time between stations that are among the world’s best”; and meet performance targets without exceeding its limited budget.

Already, customer satisfaction ratings have soared to 80 percent, service punctuality to over 92 percent, and travel information provision to 82 percent over the last three years, so it is clearly on the right track.