Microsoft and Accenture deliver high performance to transit riders and authorities
Big-city commuters who regularly ride the bus, light rail or subway may never think about the technology that makes their metro card or pass work. Fortunately, Microsoft CityNext and Accenture Transportation have given a lot of thought to an integrated fare management system that makes it easy for riders to move seamlessly through multiple transit authorities, manage one account online or via their mobile device, and have confidence that applicable fares and discounts will be applied. For transit authorities, the Accenture Fare Management Solution (AFMS) delivers reliability, scalability, flexibility and lower cost—truly a win-win for both citizens and local governments.
AFMS is deployed in some of the largest cities in the world. For example, PRESTO is a multi-vendor, multi-operator, regional automated fare collection system, built on open architecture and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software, enabling customers of the participating Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) transit providers and Ottawa to pay for and use transit in multiple modes (e.g., trains, subways, buses). Over 8,000 in-field devices have been installed in vehicles and sites, with substantial increases to come. PRESTO has transformed the customer experience by enabling new products, services and channels for riders to pay for and use transit.
Michael Wilson, Accenture’s managing director of Transportation for North America, attributes the AFMS success to the strong Microsoft-Accenture partnership. “The Accenture Fare Management Solution helps deliver the flexible, modern payment system that customers really want,” he said. “It’s uniquely positioned and helping change the industry and how it approaches technology.”
He notes that many large cities—including Boston, New York, San Francisco and Seattle—share a similar challenge as they look to replace existing fare management systems: “All of these cities have multiple transit authorities—this is a common theme we’re seeing in large city regions.” AFMS has effectively addressed regional coordination and crossing multiple municipal boundaries in The Netherlands, which has 15 transit agencies covering the entire country. The same is true with PRESTO, which serves 11 provincial and municipal transit agencies and 6.5 million residents—the third largest region in North America, behind New York and Mexico City.
In addition to enabling customers to easily travel across multiple transit agencies with one electronic fare card, transit officials like the fact that AFMS is built on commercially available software, including Microsoft Azure, Dynamics AX and BizTalk. “It gives the transit agencies an alternative to the proprietary products of the past, which limited their ability to innovate and competitively integrate multiple device vendors,” Michael said. Other benefits include:
- Reliability that comes from being built on commercial software products
- Scalability to better accommodate growth
- Flexibility to deliver special offers, discounts, rewards, social networking and other rider features
- Automatically remaining current with upgrades and updates
- Seamlessly integrating with regional transportation agencies and multiple device vendors.
Michael believes the Azure-based version of AFMS brings even more advantages to very large cities. “By moving to the cloud, it allows the agencies to get access to the scale when they need it and reliability at a lower cost,” he said, explaining that the cloud-based approach relieves transit agencies of managing their own data centers and all of the associated hardware and software.
Accenture’s Fare Management Solution truly reflects the company’s tagline: “High performance. Delivered”—and Microsoft CityNext is proud to partner on innovative, flexible payment systems that meet—or exceed—customer expectations, lower costs and improve efficiency.
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