By Freya Purnell
The Auckland Regional Transport Authority (ARTA) has turned to SAP BusinessObjects BI reporting and analysis tools to report on the performance of bus operators in the region.
ARTA’s goal for the project was to provide flexible reporting and drawdown for internal audiences and reporting via PDF to external stakeholders, and the project team reviewed several solutions before choosing BusinessObjects to sit across its newly developed SQL data warehouse.
The project went live in mid-2009, with 20 users in passenger transport operations at ARTA using the system to report. According to Roger Jones, IT manager, ARTA, the initial rounds of reporting have drawn positive feedback from users.
“The take-up has been excellent and end users are very happy. The speed of report development and rendering from very large datasets is dramatically faster than previously. Because it is so easy to use, people are engaging more with the data, they’re better informed which means improved decision making,” Jones said.
“We’re already seeing hard benefits in cost savings due to the much shorter time it takes to develop reports, including scheduled weekly and monthly reports. It has definitely paid for itself in business terms.”
Much of the huge volume of data is collected automatically whenever buses reach or depart from a stop. As ARTA becomes familiar with the rich reporting it is now able to get from this data there is potential for the organisation to use the reports to inform decision making in areas as diverse as bus scheduling and timetabling, passenger occupancy levels, staff rostering and route planning.
