PROJECT REPORT On Information Systems at Indian Railway Catering and Tourist Corporation (IRCTC) By Group 6 of Section I, 2013-15 Batch-MBA Group Members: Seat No. 39: Tanu Chadha Seat No. 41: Aradhya Darshan Seat No. 49: Sukrit Sethi Seat No. 43: Vaibhav Gulati Seat No. 54: Ayesha Mahajan Seat No. 45: Tanya Dua Seat No. 74: Ishita Sharma 1
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PROJECT REPORTOn Information Systems at
Indian Railway Catering and Tourist Corporation (IRCTC)
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Web Server
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Top Level Domain
India
.in
Content Language
English
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Information Systems at IRCTC:
PASSENGER RESERVATION SYSTEM: IRCTC is better known for changing the face of railway
ticketing in India. It pioneered internet-based rail ticket booking through its website, as well
as from the mobile phones via GPRS or SMS. Ticket cancellations can also be done online. In
addition to e-tickets, IRCTC also offers I-tickets that are basically like regular tickets except
that they are booked online and delivered by post. The tickets PNR status is also made
available. Commuters on the Mumbai Suburban Railway can also book season
tickets through the IRCTC website. IRCTC has also launched a loyalty program called Shubh
Yatra for frequent travellers. Through this program, passengers can avail of discounts on all
tickets booked round the year by paying an upfront annual fee.
Seeking to make it easier to book e-tickets, IRCTC launched a scheme called Rolling Deposit
Scheme (RDS). RDS is a hassle-free e-ticket booking scheme allowing passengers to reserve
seats against advance money kept with the corporation. IRCTC has also added flights and
hotels booking facilities to their line of online reservation services. Generally there is a huge
load on the website at 10 am, when booking of Tatkal tickets opens. The booking of tickets
varies from time to time based on festivals and vacations. IRCTC is currently using 58 iridium
servers and 10 more servers to be added to cater the heavy traffic in peak hours.
As of May 2013, the ticketing site of the IRCTC is able to handle about 1.2 lakh concurrent
connections on web servers and can book about 2000 tickets per minute. Indian Railways
plans to spend about 100 crore (US$16 million) to strengthen the website to enable it for
booking 7200 tickets per minute. CRIS, the technical arm of railways, is involved in the
upgrading of the IRCTC website.
According to a senior Railway Ministry official, the average booking per day has been
increased from 3.67 lakh in 2012 to 4.15 lakh in May 2013. Approximately, 31 crore reserve
tickets are booked in a year out of which 55% of tickets are sold through windows, 37% of
tickets are booked online and 8% are booked by ticketing agents. IRCTC's highest ever single
day booking is 5.02 lakh e-tickets on 1 March 2013.
Testing of eTicketing application by IRCTC Jul.,2012
Go Live Jan., 2014
Benefits for passengers :-
Accessibility to site during peak load
Stringent User Registration process bringing down cornering of tickets by
fictitious users.
User friendly options shall improve customer satisfaction.
Resume option to user to continue transaction from the point his session
closed/Aborted
Automatic booking if user has successfully done the payment.
Informing the users through SMS regarding the status of incomplete transaction.
Benefits to Railways/IRCTC :-
IPR with Indian Railways
Improvement in System transparency
System build on latest technology
Vendor Independence
Increase in bookings means higher revenue
Business continuity
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Next Generation e-Ticketing (NGeT) Journey Planner: Integration of limited number of
servers of IRCTC e-ticketing site with NGeT site to deliver journey planning services via NGeT
site so as to free resources on IRCTC site to improve system performance. Developed in-
house on open standard based technologies with advanced features to improve customer
experience during journey planning shall share the journey planning load of IRCTC thus
freeing the resources on servers integrated with NGeT and improve the success rate of
booking.
Timeline of events:
Idea generation May,2013
Study and Preparation June,2013
Project Started June,2013
Testing of Integrated application by IRCTC July,2013
Go Live September,2013
Benefits for passengers : -
Improved chances of Accessibility to site during peak load.
User friendly Journey Planner shall improve customer satisfaction.
Benefits to Railways/IRCTC :-
Interim Relief to passengers shall improve Railways credibility.
Resources Available to serve more users during peak load.
Increase in bookings on account of resource availability implying higher revenue.
Testing of Technology and application before full scale Roll out of NGeT.
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PART 4: Problems at IRCTC and probable developments
Of late, IRCTC’s e-ticketing service has been marred by bandwidth congestion, server errors
and transaction failures. To do away with these glitches, Railways has initiated steps to
augment e-ticket handling capacity of its website. The new e-ticketing project will facilitate
booking of about 7 lakh tickets per day. It will be launched in March 2014. With this, at least
80% people who log on to the website would be able to book tickets.
At present, passengers often face problems in booking online tickets due to technical
glitches. And, each time the website asks people not to push the ‘back’ or ‘refresh’ button,
making one sit glued to the computer. At times, the website shows the session as “expired”
and asks visitors to login again. IRCTC says these problems occur when too many users log in
at the same time.
IRCTC and CRIS are jointly working to enhance the existing ticket booking capacity and
address online booking issues. The new project is under implementation at an estimated
cost of about Rs 88 crore. Railway Board has said it will be implemented as per the
specification provided by CRIS.
Besides, Microsoft is developing a mobile application for IRCTC’s e-ticketing which will work
on Windows 8 Operating System on mobile as well as personal computers. The application is
ready and will be launched soon.
OTHER MINOR PROBLEMS - Some minor problems are mentioned below:
Home Page
● Primary purposes of website - “Reservation” and “Train Inquiry” are not visible
● It's difficult to find the starting point – especially for a novice user
● Lots of advertisements on the home page
● Lot of blinking / animated portions distract the user
● Icons and featured text are not at proper places
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● The login portion itself has too many options
● Layout doesn’t look professional.
User Registration Page
● Form does not fit into a single window, ideally it should
● User name and password are asked at end, they should be at the beginning
● Shipping address is not necessary on this page
● Designation contains only 25 characters, should be 50 characters
● Value Added Services are on the same page here, which can be avoided
● The user has to login again after registration, this should be avoided
● Sometimes, even after registration, logging in results in a message that the user is not registered.
Plan My Travel Page
● Icons aren’t clear as to their purpose - Train Icons for From and To.
● Selection date is today by default, but i-ticket (default option) requires minimum 3 days in future
● It is difficult to understand the three different types of tickets, there is help icon, but it opens in a popup window.
● The list of trains after submission, comes below the fold. It's difficult to understand that something happened after the submission.
● There are many pop-ups – availability, route, fare etc. This should be avoided.
● Ideally, an option to book the return ticket too should be provided. The request can be saved and used later, if the booking for that date has not yet started.
● There are also advertisements and other links on the Play My Travel page, they distract the user from the main task.
● Checking availability is a crucial part of the booking process, but the user has to click a button and see a popup window for this.
● Many a times, this even comes up with an “Unable to retrieve due to communication failure” problem!
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Payment Options
● There are too many payment options, and difficult to understand which one is better. This also comes up in a pop-up window. Ideally, this can be a preference that can be set in the user profile.
● Many a times, the booking process fails on payment, despite a note that you can see this in the failed payments page, it does not show up.
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PART 5: Suggestions and Conclusion
Apart from the improvements that are already being worked upon by CRIS, our suggestions for
improvement at IRCTC would be as follows:
1) Making the website completely live, taking inspirations from different live websites
like Windows Live, Plurk, Twitter and Facebook.
2) Expanding its reach of operations, by making an International variant of its website,
so that the visiting tourists can book their tickets separately.
3) Making the website 24x7, and carrying on maintenance activites on an even lesser
basis.
4) Increasing the bandwidth of the website, which would further lead to more speed
and efficient website performance.
5) The major problems mentioned above should be immediately looked upon and
resolved for end-user convenience.
Some appropriate solutions for above mentioned minor problems would be as
follows:
1. Single screen, rich internet application.
2. Reservation process on the home page of IRCTC
3. Login not required for checking availability, only for booking and can be done after
booking.
4. Station code lookup while the user types the name
5. Train availability – select multiple trains, and click once to get availability in all
6. Single date field, automatic format conversion
7. In line contextual help available
8. Visual effects to show the progress of the process
9. Single spot for advertisement – can rotate
10. Can change any parameter at any time, and the remaining will update automatically
e.g. Change in date, will automatically check availability for selected train
11. Payment options – one chosen by default, others available on request