Railroad Asset Management and Reservation Systems: IBM Travel And Transportation Framework

TransportationIBM Software

IBM Travel and Transportation Framework for railroads

2 IBM Travel and Transportation Framework for railroads

Railroads and the smarter planetTransportation is the circulatory system of our economy. Essen-tially all tangible goods — food, clothing, medicine, fuel and consumer products—have been transported to us from some-where else. This ecosystem of vehicles, infrastructure and terminals is undergoing dramatic changes driven by a world-wide population explosion, urbanization, globalization and technological innovation. Today, the world’s railroads carry billions of tons of freight and tens of billions of passengers each year — and the demand is steadily increasing. But rail-roads today are challenged by an aging infrastructure, a wide variety of geographically dispersed assets that must be man-aged, and traditional business practices that lead to inefficien-cies and bottlenecks.

By taking a smarter approach, by marrying digital technology with physical infrastructure, railroads can capitalize on change and create new opportunities. To do this, they must more accu-rately predict demand and optimize capacity, assets and infrastruc-ture. They must improve the end-to-end passenger experience. They need to increase operational efficiency, and finally, rail-roads must assure passengers and government regulators that operations are safe and secure.

Building a framework for growthThe IBM Travel and Transportation Framework is a combina-tion of IBM software products and assets that, together with IBM’s experience providing solutions to the rail industry, offers a platform for a family of solutions. The framework can enable railroads to address the needs of complex sales and delivery channels, optimize passenger and freight operations, and better manage their extensive assets to deliver on the promise of a more efficient, safe and secure freight and traveler experience. The framework is open standards based and built on common software building blocks. It is designed to support advanced information management, analytics, automation and integra-tion of processes such as reservations; multichannel sales and service; asset management; operation control; and safety, security, and surveillance.

Addressing the business challenges of today’s rail systemsThe IBM Travel and Transportation Framework focuses on five key business domains that are specific to passenger and freight rail systems.

• Reservationsystemmodernization: IBM provides innovative tools to modernize core reservation systems. We can help railroads create a highly reliable, performance-optimized reservation system that can help them deliver a wide variety of innovative customer services while modernizing their pricing and service models. IBM’s approach to modernizing reservation systems is aligned with widely accepted industry standards.

• Multichannelsalesandservice:The framework can help railroads provide a more seamless customer experience across pretravel sales channels and on-trip touch points by creating a “single view” of a passenger. The single view is accomplished by integrating information from disparate data sources and making it available to customer-centric processes.

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• Assetoptimization: The framework provides the capability for railroads to better manage capital assets throughout their revenue-producing life cycle, including acquisition, utilization, maintenance, repair, overhaul and disposition. Assets can include rolling stock, locomotives and right-of-way equip-ment such as signals and facilities.

• Operationscontrolsystems: The framework provides solu-tions that can help railroads improve operational effectiveness and reduce environmental impact through better planning of schedules, load plans, facilities, crews and equipment. For rail-roads, this includes optimizing rolling stock and crews. The solutions use business rules and business intelligence tools for decision support.

• Security,safetyandsurveillance:The framework can help railroads integrate data from video and other monitoring devices and apply advanced analytics to improve security, reduce security overhead and move from a reactive to a more proactive response.

Addressing the challenges of the modern railroadThe IBM Travel and Transportation Framework can help rail companies transform the way they operate their business, from the rail yard to the station, from the most isolated section of track to the back office. A scalable, modular, integrated plat-form built on industry standards, it enables rail companies to start by solving a particular business problem in one of the five domains—for example, reservation system modernization—and then move on to execute a multichannel sales and service system that enables a single view of the passenger. By leveraging the first project to develop a second, then a third and so on, economies of scale are achieved.

This incremental path to modernization, built on open standards and the collaboration, optimization and analytical capabilities needed to integrate with your existing applications, can lower costs and reduce risk while improving the speed, safety, reli-ability and profitability of today’s global rail systems.

For more informationTo learn more about the IBM Travel and Transportation Framework, please contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit:

ibm.com/software/industry/transportation

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