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ADVERTORIAL
Jonathan Raper, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at TransportAPI (TAPI), explains how it is innovating with performance data to improve the customer experience
Bringing new rail performance data to Rail Data Marketplace T
here is currently a huge focus in the rail industry on understanding the drivers of service performance so that the causes and consequences can be tracked and addressed. “It is important to understand the customer experience of performance, because what you can’t measure you can’t improve,” said Jonathan Raper, CEO at TAPI. Jonathan is the co-founder of the leading managed services provider for transport data that is providing customer information to almost half of all UK train operating companies for their customer apps, websites, and screens, serving a billion requests for information from its platform every month. It has also been working with train operator Northern to provide a new source of performance data that more closely aligns with the customer experience rather than the engineering perspective. TAPI Rail Performance Managed Service has this month been released on Rail Data Marketplace for general use with both free and chargeable tiers of access, depending on volume. “TAPI Rail Performance has been created by recording the entire output of Darwin exactly as it was presented to the customer at the time, and records are tagged with all four key references (RID, RSID, train UID, and headcode) used to identify trains,” said Jonathan.
Image: Nicky Somerville-Jones
“This new source is available through an API or a web service. It covers scheduled, expected, and actual times for all stations and passing points, and includes station dwell times, schedule changes, and granular cancellation data by service and stop.” TAPI started in the open data movement with the organisation delivering live data to Transport
TAPI Rail Performance Managed Service Rail performance… as the customer sees it
Trusted by
May 2024
for London for the 2012 London Olympics. Led by Jonathan, the company has since gone on to pick up a series of huge contracts including for FirstGroup’s public transport information. “We have an exceptional operating record, for example, we don’t need engineering downtime because we have to operate continuously around the clock. We recognise that we hold enormous delivery responsibilities because should we fail, our major customers would suffer massive reputational damage,” said Jonathan. “I’m really proud we have built the business from a start-up to one of the major players in this field. We have evolved from being purely information delivery, departure boards, and timetables, towards these value-added services like performance. “We have an equivalent bus performance product which allows you to see all of the actual journeys that all of the buses take across the country because that is the key to understanding things like congestion and real journey times. “There is an ever-growing appetite for what we are providing. The key to the future is sometimes the past, and what has happened, and so we are passionate about providing a high quality easy to access version of history for our customers to use to provide a better service for their customers.” Visit www.transportapi.com/ for more details.