eGov-April-[39-40]-Information Management and Decision Support Systems in Railroads

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in d ian rai l w a y s

Information Management and Decision Support Systems in Railroads Railroads require an integrated business application solution comprising of Business Intelligence and DW components to unlock the value of information hidden in enterprise systems Manoj Jain & Ashish Raj

Indian Railways, for whom Freight Transport accounts for 70% revenues, as a case in point, have the following issues: • Higher demand for Freight and Passenger transport, with planned economic growth • Need for capacity enhancement in the Railway network over the next 10-15 years • Technological upgradation for better maintenance of railway assets • Greater competition from roadways, with major investments in highway network upgradation • Increase freight market share through higher availability of services at competitive prices • Greater attention to passenger services and safety • Heavily subsidised passenger fares, distorted passenger pricing • Upgradation of the Railway Production units for improved efficiency and productivity

• • •

Freight revenue enhancement Passenger revenue enhancement Improved and optimised service In most railroads the systems in the organisation are geared to run the train services. The same basic operational data about the trains, services, locations and rolling stock is manually keyed into several systems for the purpose of producing Management Information Systems (MIS). These are un-integrated stand-alone systems. The MIS currently is therefore fragmented, inaccurate and time consuming. It gives different answers to the same question depending upon which system has been interrogated.

Through the following diagram, Key Result Areas of a typical railroad company are illustrated:

Railroad organisations are using IT for greater efficiency in the following three key areas – ov

April 2008

Few inadequacies in these systems are: • The same basic information from different systems does not match • Users have no faith in Management Information System (MIS) • There is a high level of frustration with the timeliness & quality of data • Multiple applications are costly, and inaccurate The systems also have limitations in their ability to provide an integrated framework to manipulate historical data and provide a common platform for complex analytics. 39


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