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Prorail is responsible for the Dutch railway infrastructure's maintenance, extension, renewal, and security. It uses a lot of applications for this, like Plandix, an application developed by Sopra Steria and managed in Mendix.
Product owner Cliff Bos says that transport on the tracks is much more complicated than people think when they get on the train. Cliff works for RIGD-LOXIA, a collaboration between Prorail (RIGD) and engineering firms Movares and Arcadis (LOXIA). They are involved in every change in IT and infrastructure at the track. RIGD-LOXIA takes care of the management and engineering of the infra configuration data for train security and control. These configuration data are the foundations for application to plan railway capacity for the daily transport of passengers and maintenance and freight transport.
Plandix is the application that allows planning coordinators to plan and guide the exchange of drawings, configuration, and data sets. Important consumers of Plandix data inside Prorail are its capacity management and traffic control. Plandix has more than one hundred active users across different disciplines and companies. These users are planners, rail system engineers, project coordinators, building managers, team leaders, and engineers.
High-performance team of Sopra Steria
Prorail uses the Plandix application since 2014. Working for RIGD-LOXIA, a multidisciplinary High-performance team (HPT) of Sopra Steria, has been responsible since 2019 for continuous optimization, further development, and management of the app. This HPT has different roles, such as a Mendix consultant, a Mendix architect, a scrum master, a tester, and a BI consultant. Team members can have more than one role in a balanced and complete team. The team has access to ample expertise and knowledge at Sopra Steria and is supported when necessary.
Taking the application to a higher level
The Sopra Steria HPT works intensively with Prorail to continuously improve the application. The team does this by starting with a management and development plan roadmap. Cliff Bos: ”With Sopra Steria, we could bring the application to a higher level. The team first analyzed the app’s quality and focused on a couple of quick wins. After that, the code was optimized, enhancing the application's performance considerably. The development speed also went up and with this the predictability of us delivering a result. Products are delivered neatly on time now, which gives the application an excellent image inside the organization. We’re getting great results reflected in the app’s score. Plandix structurally receives an extremely high score of 1,4 or 1,5. Currently, the team is spending about 20 percent of its time managing the application and 80 percent developing it further. By building more logical flows and cutting doubles, we expect to lose even less time in management and have even more time for continuous development.”
Thinking together about transformations from a business perspective
Prorail has asked Sopra Steria to look at the architecture of Plandix and to draw up a vision & strategy about how the application can be used the best in the future to add more business value. What has to happen on its architectural and business side? How can we professionalize the team even more? Which sources need to be added, and which ones do not?
Monique de Wit, ICT Manager RIGD-LOXIA Development at Prorail, thinks it is valuable that Sopra Steria, as a partner with excellent knowledge of and expertise in Mendix, looks with them for ways to broaden the functionality and efficiency of the application to benefit the business “As an organization, we have multiple business targets while also being right in the middle of a digital transformation that has made data increasingly more important. How does the planning of the projects fit this? And what is Mendix’s role?” Monique expects that Plandix will play an ever more important role because of the digital transformation from ‘drawing to data’ that Prorail is going through. “The more correct and complete the design information, the better the data of infra projects can be exchanged. Sopra Steria has heaps of knowledge about Mendix, and they know how to make it relevant and use it, making them a business partner with added value for our organization.”
Collaboration
Monique de Wit is very optimistic about working with Sopra Steria: “Working inside or with RIGD-LOXIA means working with many different parties. Close collaboration is vital, and Sopra Steria immediately understood this. We mutually understand which stage we are in and which steps need to be taken to bring Plandix to its next stage of adulthood. Sopra Steria thinks about what we must do to be prepared for the future, helping us achieve our business goals. There is good chemistry, which makes the collaboration lovely. There is a mutual goal for which parties support and supplement each other, making us thrive as a team.”
Besides Plandix, RIGD-LOXIA also has its chain region dashboard. This dashboard is fed with data from Plandix and gives insight into the quality and lead time of the various products during the different project stages in the entire infra-data chain. Using the chain region dashboard, RIGD-LOXIA can adjust the quality and lead time on time. The dashboard has been included in a data warehouse environment set up by Prorail, enabling the usage of the data by other applications.