“Dutch Railways is becoming a data-driven organization. We are in transformation.” - Geert Van der Hoek, IT Manager, Dutch Railways
For Geert Van der Hoek, IT Manager at Dutch Railways, this is both a point of pride and an unwavering challenge; he is the man responsible for overseeing the state service provider’s transformation—from a reliance on siloed data languishing in legacy systems to a modern, cloud-based infrastructure.
This is no small task.
“I’m lucky,” he says humbly from his office in Utrecht, Netherlands. “I have a lot of good people on my team. And that’s important, because for Dutch Railways it’s not just about getting data insights, but how we take advantage of them.”
That’s exactly what Geert’s team has been doing—harnessing the organization’s data to deliver maximum benefits for rail users. And the results have been transformative.
A rail network that sees 1.1 million passengers pass through its stations every day generates a huge amount of data, and there are incredible opportunities to improve the service offered to customers if you can harness it.
This was the challenge facing Dutch Railways five years ago. “We could see more and more data coming from our trains, passengers, and online media, offering us possibilities to do more,” says Martijn Scheele, Head of Data and Analytics at Dutch Railways. “The problem was, we couldn’t react quickly enough.”
The hindrance was the way data was managed: there was no central governance. “Each of our business units had its own data warehouses, definitions of data, and tools to visualize and manipulate data,” recalls Geert.
When General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws were implemented across Europe and a raft of new legally binding KPIs came into force, this became even more of an issue.
“We weren’t in control enough,” admits Geert. “There was no way for us to see what data was being used by which user.”
This presented an obvious problem with compliance, but the impact was also felt by rail users. With so many departments having their own sources of data, the organization couldn’t make the right decisions for customers because it didn’t have all the data at its disposal—everything was siloed.
“We were all feeling the pressure of needing to liberate the data we had in our ecosystem,” says Martijn. “But that wasn’t an easy or straightforward thing to do.”
Five years later, and the way Dutch Railways manages its data has changed, and with it how the organization operates.
“We are moving to one Dutch Railways,” says Geert contentedly. “We are now able to combine the data between all the silos, between all the business units, to create a single source of truth.”
The organization has migrated to a cloud-based solution that provides ready access to smarter data analytics: Microsoft Azure. By centralizing its data sources, Dutch Railways is able to achieve greater insight into all facets of the organization, allowing the data team to be fully compliant with governance expectations.
“Now, we have the right control over our data to bring trust inside and outside our organization,” says Geert with relief. And it’s a trust that extends to the decision makers at the very top of Dutch Railways, who have been suitably impressed by the results to back the continued data transformation of the organization.
But the benefits of having more control over the data doesn’t stop there.
With all of the customer data centrally accessible and able to be visualized using the Microsoft Power BI suite of business analytics tools, the team at Dutch Railways is now innovating like never before, coming up with new ideas for how to improve its service for customers.
“By using tools such as Microsoft Power BI, suddenly we are able to be much more agile as an organization, bringing together all sorts of different elements, insights, and data to drive innovations,” says Geert. “It has shifted the attitude we have toward the way we work.”
He has established an internal innovation community to bring people together from different units of the organization to discuss and develop ideas around themes like artificial intelligence, blockchain, and security.
“We start with a proof of concept and see if we can develop it into something scalable,” say Geert. “That way we can see if an idea is worth investing more money into.”
One such innovation was the Seat Finder app, which uses color coding to show passengers where to stand on the platform so they can find less crowded carriages when boarding.
“When we first started to develop Seat Finder, we only invested a few thousand Euros into the project,” explains Geert. “But after a few weeks, we could see there was great potential. So we scaled its development and eventually ended up investing a couple of million Euros into it.”
It was an investment that paid off, with one external audit company estimating the social and branding impact of the app at multiple millions.
The app makes use of a combination of track sensors, which show the weight distribution on each carriage. Power BI, HDInsight, Analysis Services, and Machine Learning models on the Azure platform work together to create a visualization of the number of people in each carriage.
“The dashboards in Power BI give us a really powerful way of visualizing these insights,” says Geert.
It has been a huge success with customers, who are now able to board trains faster and make better use of space on carriages. “We have managed to optimize seat availability, meaning 20,000 more people are able to get a seat each day,” Geert says with satisfaction. And the success of the app has led to Seat Finder becoming the number one example in the Dutch national course for AI—part of the Kickstart AI initiative that Dutch Railways has established alongside four other leading companies in the Netherlands.
Looking to the future, Geert sees these kinds of data-driven innovations bringing performance gains across many different parts of the rail network.
“At the moment, we are experimenting with a gravity locator,” he says. “It will analyze the gravity on different parts of the train, alongside images and other data so we can give more accurate information to those in our network responsible for cleaning or security. That’s just one of the innovations we are developing at the moment.”
When it came to moving to the cloud, Azure was an easy choice for Dutch Railways. And not just because of the interoperation with its existing solutions like Microsoft 365.
“We can see that Microsoft is investing a lot of money into Azure,” says Geert. “So we trust that having Microsoft on our side will take us to a higher level going forward.”
Dutch Railways has extended its relationship with Microsoft. “Microsoft is no longer just a provider of tools like PowerPoint and Word. Now, it is helping us develop our digital capability. It is helping us create an educational environment internally, which means we can learn from its techniques, and be more competitive in the marketplace,” says Geert. “Microsoft is helping us transform into a digital company.”
How does Geert feel to be at the center of his organization’s incredible transformation?
“I am very proud to have made this kind of change for our company,” says Geert, who is now able to enjoy the results of his work. With new innovations like Seat Finder making the train experience so much better for users, customer satisfaction ratings have soared to 80 percent, service punctuality to over 92 percent, and travel information provision to 82 percent over the last three years. Dutch Railways is clearly on the right track.
“I am proud to see how our investment in data is returning such great benefits for our company and our customers.”
“We are moving to one Dutch Railways. We are now able to combine the data between all the silos, between all the business units, to create a single source of truth.”
Geert Van der Hoek, IT Manager, Dutch Railways
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