turns into an international control room: the video call connected steering professionals of smart ticketing production go through all the statuses of on-going projects. Software Specialist Ville updates the status of latest encoding specifications to factory team and instructs the setup of new ticket testing environment and at factory the material department confirms the raw material stock levels. Everything is rolling smoothly – just waiting for the artwork approvals from customer’s side. About Confidex Smart Booklet™ and other novel products After the hectic and fast paced hour’s meeting, I ask from Jaana how is it like to handle such a demanding and urgent processes – keeping a multimillion inhabitant’s city stocked with public transport tickets? Jaana takes a sip of coffee and smiles. “Our internal processes are finetuned. We just recently even got more capacity and machines to our factory – but with the customer communication, there’s always something to improve. We could offer more – like knowhow about the actual tickets, when it comes to developing a city’s ticketing system. Currently I feel that the ticket tendering process can at some occasions hold back the development. Many cities and operators still order tickets always with “the same specifications as previously” – when actually they could benefit from
the novel options and innovations available today. For instance, many cities would benefit using Confidex Smart Booklets instead of their basic vouchers: the Confidex Smart Booklet is visually fraud proof and gives fast ROI, compared to the only seemingly more economical voucher type “dummy” tickets. As the smart ticket is not only encoded but individually numbered, the driver can check and confirm the validity immediately onsite – this is not possible with the old paper vouchers, which in the end can be more costly as a result of lost revenue by fraud.” Jaana and the other members of Confidex smart ticketing production engineering team are the primary technical interface to customers, but occasionally customer’s software department wants to speak directly with supplier’s software specialists – and this is when they call to Ville. I reach him on the way back to his computer site and ask how it is to communicate with clients. “Of course it’s nice to work with a customer who has an advanced systems and internal know-how – but I would say the situation is quite rare still. For now, many cities and operators are in the process of developing or upgrading their systems and do not possess such resources yet. In such occasion it means that we often have to guide and educate them about smart tickets and the order process – as we don’t have a