Rail Delivery Group finds Salesforce just the ticket as its platform to keep analytics and integration on track

By Stuart Lauchlan

July 15, 2021

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Rail Delivery Group (RDG) is an organization that brings together the companies that run the UK’s railways. There are two main parts - the trade body which represents passengers and freight train operators, and the Service Delivery Arm. The Group offers a number of B2B, B2B2C and B2C products, including railcards, National Rail Enquiries and passenger assistance.

Given its remit, RDG has a lot of different large technical projects running at any given time, says Mark Hemsley, RDG Architecture Practice Lead, a situation which has significant data management and integration implications:

We have a lot of systems, a lot of technologies. Our data has been stored in many different places, using many different technologies. Any given project could use upwards of 20 systems. The vision for RDG from a data and integration point of view was to have that data be more accessible, to have it managed, to have it available for use - both from a data and analytics point of view, but also to build applications that we hadn't been able to previously, but to do so in a controlled managed way that gave us confidence that the data was both secure and accessible.

That accessibility aspect is very important, affirms Toby Ayre, RDG Head of Data and Analytics:

It's really important to us that people who need data for their jobs have access to the data they need, in the form that they need it. By bringing it all into one central place and making it available to those people, they can use that to really generate value for the business. That might be increasing revenue, decreasing costs, improving the customer experience, whatever it might be. We want data to be at the heart of those business decisions for those individuals. The way we've done that is by bringing data from those different platforms into one central place and then making it available to users to actually consume for their day jobs.

API focus

From a technical perspective, a key goal was to move to a position where APIs were no longer viewed as a by-product of system development, but rather as something of business value that would at the forefront of attention when developing new propositions. Hemsley explains:

Our ambition with data is to make our interfaces more accessible, to make them more composable, and to allow both our internal users, our  business units, to be able to compose interfaces through experiences and to make interfaces more accessible and easier to use for train operators and for other data consumers. We hope that this will enable experiences that have been previously impossible or incredibly difficult because of the amount of effort to access and to use our data.

He adds:

Another key thing for us was to start fostering a culture of continual improvement. RDG traditionally had very large projects that would only happen every 10 years. Through investing in our teams and our processes around data and making it something that was everyone's day job and focused on improving the way that we did integrations, we started to foster a culture of improvement that we're hoping to extend across RDG.

Analytics action

Ayre cites the range of railcards on offer, a core part of the B2C business, as an exemplar of the kind of challenge that RDG faces:

Historically, we outsource the entire [railcards] thing and the company that we use for that used to provide monthly reports that told us how much money we were generating from all our marketing emails in terms of customers buying rail cards or renewing rail cards. The problem with the monthly report is it's out-of-date pretty much as soon as you've received it and actually doesn't really help you understand what to do to use that information.

The COVID crisis and its impact on travel actually provided an unexpected benefit in tackling this issue, he adds:

As you'd expect, our railcard sales dropped quite significantly as customers stopped traveling on the railways and therefore didn't need these discount products. That really gave us time to stop and think about what we needed to do going forward and how to recover from this. Actually COVID really gave us a renewed focus on how we can do this marketing.

RDG's in-house data analytics team has now built a system to provide  much closer-to-real-time analysis for marketing team to use. This builds on Salesforce Service Cloud for orders, renewals and sales of railcard products, alongside Marketing Cloud to send emails and track bounces, click rates, subscribes and open rates, while Tableau provides analytics capabilities for the marketing team to go in and see how emails are performing.

In addition, RDG uses Mulesoft to develop new products at a faster pace and lower cost with less risk than previously. Hemsley explains:

Railcards are released quite consistently, once a year previously, and they are quite a difficult process for operational systems to deal with. There's a lot of changes, there's a lot of new data items that are coming in,  there are different processes. Our approach with Mulesoft was to make it more of a composable solution that would allow us to use specific parts of data for different railcard solutions and allow the addition of any new railcards to be a cheaper, less risky, speedier process.

Vaccine Economy goals

As the UK emerges into the Vaccine Economy and the British Government encourages a gradual shift back to the office environment, the expectation is that there will be some form of a return to a daily commute, although the extent and form that this will take is far from clear as yet. Whatever does emerge, RDG believes that it is in a much better place to deal with it than it was going into the pandemic.

That said, there are still ambitions ahead to aim for, says Ayre:

From an analytical perspective, we want to keep moving down the path towards advanced analytics, moving from descriptive to predictive to prescriptive.

We also want to continue expanding the range of source systems that are feeding into our platform. Most of our big enterprise systems already are, but there's a few more still to do and, of course, there will be new systems that we buy and build in the future as well which we need to integrate with. The more data sources we have coming into the platform, the richer the insight that we can provide to users coming out the back of it.

Finally, we also want to continue moving from 'batch' to 'streaming' as a first choice. Wherever we can get closer to real time, the more relevant the insights will be to our users and action can be taken much, much sooner to the original event that happens.

As for learnings for other organizations to take on board, Ayre emphasizes a need to maintain a strong user focus throughout. To that end, RDG has been using Tableau as its ‘way in’ to find out what users want and need:

We'd give them different types of insight in different formats and that would then trigger a whole load of other questions. We use that to shape our thinking. So we kind of work backwards in a way, in that we started with the user and then we built the data platform…We use Tableau as our tool to reach people and make them excited about data. Once they start using that data, they then start to ask more questions. That then shapes our roadmap for future developments.