Effective Data Management: InRail Case Study

How the company used the BI tool to consolidate cross-function data interchange.
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InRail locomotive on rails.

InRail

The private railway company InRail operates throughout Italy, Slovenia and Croatia. With an average of around 150 trains per week, the company is able to provide transport services for all types of goods.

The company has a registered office in Genoa and operational offices in Udine, Nova Gorica and Zagabria. Today it employs a staff of more than 230 people. This includes accredited instructors for personnel training, expert agents for technical verification, train driving and training activities. Plus, it has a multilingual operations room in charge of organizing and monitoring traffic that constantly interfaces with Italian and foreign railway networks, customers, suppliers and other companies.

"We were looking for a software solution that could support us in measuring and analysing internal targets. Also, we had to share these results externally, reducing the distance between supplier and customer and promoting synergy with our partners. With Binary System, we found it."

Luca Seclì, Maintenance Manager at InRail

A longstanding partnership

Binary System and InRail started operations in the same period, at the beginning of Italian rail freight market liberalization. But this is not the only trait we have in common: a strong desire for innovation and a view to continuous growth have always characterized our collaboration. We are driven by the desire to meet operational and market requirements through precise, punctual and customer-oriented services.

"Our collaboration with Binary System has led us over the years to experiment with SoftRail products in all areas of the company. Each software allows us to manage the operations and reporting."

Luca Seclì, Maintenance Manager at InRail

BI tool

Designed specifically to simplify the interpretation of data, our BI tool integrates all the software in the SoftRail suite. This cross-sectional approach allows the aggregated reading of different management flows. They are now clearer thanks to detailed reporting, interactive graphs and customizable KPIs.
 

On this subject, Luca Seclì commented: “Communication and data exchange between functions has therefore become a priority in our company. In order to to propose the best possible solution to customers, we need to share all relevant information.”

The results

Currently, the BI tool testing phase is completed. InRail has identified the main useful reports and business processes that can be supported and automated by the software.

Their objective is to create a production dashboard for each area in which to collect the main KPIs. For example, in the Maintenance Department, Dashboards are useful to monitor the maintenance cycle of discarded wagons in the area. According to Seclì, they allow to “analyse and reduce vehicle downtime in stations as much as possible.”

Next steps

After some years of using the BI Tool, Inrail is now able to refine best practices and think of new functionalities to develop. In particular, the focus will be on the creation of dedicated dashboards, visible to customers and suppliers.

This experience has shaped InRail’s culture towards a common vision of performance targets, which are now shared between the different operational areas. Our SoftRail suite has accompanied InRail through the changes in the railway management world, growing together with its users in a reliable and secure way.

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