Cloud, IoT, and Automation Transform VR's Operations

Challenge

As a result, VR (former Arriva) experienced a significant amount of downtime. The outages resulted in severe penalties from transport operators because VR couldn’t submit reports on time. Another challenge was the ongoing digitalization of the transport industry and VR found it difficult to sustain the business. Their old IT environment couldn’t handle the increasing digitalization and the need to provide better data to both bus drivers and traffic planners. The company needed also to send real-time data to transport operators such as Storstockholms Lokaltrafik.

VR with the help of Euvic migrated hundreds of Windows servers to the cloud, including large business-critical SQL and Oracle databases in the first phase. Euvic analyzed existing applications and made them cloud-ready. Then, Euvic migrated several SQL and Oracle databases to Relational Database Services to take advantage of the use of managed services.

After stabilizing and modernizing the IT environment in late 2017, (which also included moving to O365 and building a new, modern end-user platform), VR began building digital solutions to improve and optimize its train management services as the second phase. Consequently, VR was able to win several new service contracts as they demonstrated a better way of managing traffic than their competitors. In this case, Euvic was responsible for providing two development teams for VR to complete their “train portal” – the portal of digital solutions for managing train traffic.

The third phase started in early 2018. VR matured as an organization and implemented Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) to improve collaboration between the business and IT departments and get more value from their increased digitization efforts. VR chose to digitize its bus operations as well. Euvic provided not only the bulk of the development resources but also a systems team that planned, built, and implemented a Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) pipeline that enabled VR to significantly improve the quality and speed of development, while lowering the operational costs of maintaining the new solutions.

A cost-effective future

Since the launch of the portal to manage bus traffic (June 2019), VR has had zero downtime on the technical platform and very few technical problems. There is still an order backlog of new business requirements but the operational costs of running the new platforms are about a third of the costs of running the train portal. There was no need to build a common CI/CD pipeline where all development teams built the solutions the same way. Now, the train portal undergoes restructuring. By the end of 2020, it will be moved to the same CI/CD pipeline used by the bus portal.

Now, VR is in an excellent position to continue growing in Sweden and has completely changed the way it works. New technologies are now a critical business enabler giving opportunities that were far from the case in 2016. Through digital transformation, Euvic has played a crucial role in providing VR with high-quality and cost-effective development and infrastructure teams. During the transformation, Euvic has also helped VR save operational costs with the implementation of a CI/CD pipeline. Development is much more streamlined and efficient than in 2017. The collaboration with Euvic made it possible.