How a public transit agency transformed its services, starting with unified ticketing data

Managing a large, multi-modal public transit network comes with complexity—so having a clear view of data and performance is essential.

A key goal for our client, an Australian public transit agency, was to create seamless journeys and simplified ticketing across its statewide network of trains, buses and ferries. netBI was adopted by the agency and its entire network of service providers. 

The organisation was just beginning to roll out integrated smart ticketing and also required a system that would allow for a simple and quick generation of information needed for strategic planning, ministerial briefs, and to address service issues and customer complaints.

By working with netBI, the agency was able to quickly centralise and process various formats of data from six disparate ticketing systems (magnetic-stripe, paper-based, and smartcard) to report on patronage and trip level service performance. 

netBI also helped the public transit agency to enrich ticketing data with reference attributes like schedules and arrival and departure records—enabling insights into the passenger journey, service loads, utilisation, revenue trends, and alignment between service delivery and schedule.

The agency continued to evolve how it leverages the netBI data platform to enhance its operations and reporting. For example, the organisation has used our solution to:

• Streamline how it reviews and manages processes to change fares and understand the impact of fare subsidies and free travel initiatives, using netBI’s comparative fare calculation tools. 
• Achieve detailed analysis of inter and intramodal passenger transfers, including customer experience metrics.
• Improve the accuracy and completeness of reporting on trip completions and on-time running performance of service providers, including integrating real-time AVL and telematics data.
• Support advances in smart ticketing: with ongoing identification of data quality and completeness issues.    
• Implement corporate smartcard reporting for high-level comparative and foregone revenue validation and time series trend analysis.

With a unified repository of high-quality data, a wealth of custom analytical tools perfectly aligned to their business processes, and almost instantaneous reporting capabilities, the agency’s business activities are more data-driven and effective.

Our client embraces netBI’s SaaS solution to guide reporting for almost a wide range of business functions including network planning, financial management, customer service, marketing and fleet management.

The agency uses these insights to:

• Respond quickly and confidently to ministerial requests or customer issues
• Detect and report on fraudulent smartcard usage to inform revenue protection
• Use ‘what-if’ scenarios to model and mitigate any impacts of fare changes
• Develop and monitor contractual KPIs and targets for service delivery partners
• Assess and manage data used to drive smart ticketing improvements
• Improve scheduled timetabling
• Identify and manage under or over-utilised services
• Identify marketing trends with a detailed understanding of customer activities
• Analyse its sales and maintain a detailed audit trail of transactions
• Guide infrastructure planning and report on usage and performance

The agency’s team members can easily create and run tailored reports via netBI’s self-service interfaces. The application is used widely across the organisation by strategic and network planners, financial staff, managers, customer service personnel, auditors, system analysts, revenue protection personnel, contract authorities, and operational teams.