MÁV-START Zrt. takes control with IBM

MÁV-START Zrt. is the wholly-owned passenger subsidiary of MÁV, the Hungarian State Railway company. Responsible for transporting some 140 million people each year, MÁV-START strives to offer an efficient, high-quality service that is responsive to the changing needs of its customers.

Financial reporting and analysis at MÁV-START were previously handled in a largely manual fashion using spreadsheets that were shared by email. There was no central system for collating and processing financial data – or data on sales, service levels, human resources, and so on. Planning, analysis and reporting were therefore time-consuming, inflexible and error-prone processes.

Analysts and other internal consumers of reporting were continually exchanging emails with large file attachments, and there was little or no control over the overall process or the data itself.

To accelerate data processing, free up time for analysis, increase the accuracy and consistency of reporting and enable greater flexibility, MÁV-START opted to deploy IBM Cognos Planning.

The benefits were quickly apparent, as András Ujlaki, Director of Controlling at MÁV-START, explains: “When preparing reports, processing the raw data takes much less time, so there is more time available for analysis. This is the greatest single benefit of the whole project, as it is sometimes necessary to produce reports almost immediately. We estimate the time savings to be 30 percent, on average.”

Partnering for success
A large portion of the IT service provision capability at MÁV-START is outsourced to a separate subsidiary, and operations are managed by an external team. With a relatively small in-house IT team, it was vital for MÁV-START to select a capable partner to handle the design and deployment of its new IBM Cognos business analytics solution.

Following a formal tendering exercise, MÁV-START chose to work with IBCnet Kft, a leading Hungarian systems integrator with advanced skills in business analytics solutions. As part of the project, IBCnet also helped develop a central data mart, which is fed with data from a number of enterprise systems at MÁV-START. The automated collation and normalization of data reduces administrative effort for analysts and provides a single source of accurate data for IBM Cognos Planning.

András Ujlaki says: “While our parent company uses Cognos TM1, we chose to use Cognos Planning as it provided all the key functionality we needed in a very user-friendly package. The skilled project management and professional advice we received from IBCnet was a major factor in the overall success of the Cognos deployment.”

Weighing up the options
The first output of the new solution was the creation of the Public Service Report System (PSRS), which produces reports on whether each railway line is meeting the expectations of railway passengers. The full controlling solution went live eight months later, offering complex planning, forecasting and what-if analysis.

The solution has almost 50 users today – from administrators and data input personnel through to business analysts and managers. It generates invaluable information to support management decisions, including key performance indicators (KPIs) across a range of business areas.

Using IBM Cognos Planning, analysts can model scenarios for the entire business or for individual departments. Scenario planning is especially useful for predicting the impact of major events such as the closure of European airspace following the 2010 volcanic eruption in Iceland. This caused a sudden jump in international rail traffic, putting significant strain on MÁV-START.

By running what-if analyses in Cognos, MÁV-START can investigate different responses to such events and determine the likely best course of action. It can also model the likely impact of, for example, re-opening a previously closed branch line. As the IBM Cognos solution pulls in data from both financial and non-financial systems, it enables MÁV-START to look at a very broad range of variables and to model complex scenarios.

By replacing a tangle of spreadsheets with a single, consistent source of data for analysis and reporting, MÁV-START has improved the quality of its management information. The solution has also improved the speed and accuracy of reporting, not least by removing the requirement to manually key data into spreadsheets.

Rather than needing to exchange numerous emails with large file attachments, users can now immediately access up-to-date data and use it to refresh existing reports. Finally, the flexibility of the IBM Cognos solution enables MÁV-START to modify existing reports rapidly, helping to meet changing requirements in an efficient manner.

About IBM Business Analytics
IBM Business Analytics software delivers actionable insights decision-makers need to achieve better business performance. IBM offers a comprehensive, unified portfolio of business intelligence, predictive and advanced analytics, financial performance and strategy management, governance, risk and compliance and analytic applications.

With IBM software, companies can spot trends, patterns and anomalies, compare “what if” scenarios, predict potential threats and opportunities, identify and manage key business risks and plan, budget and forecast resources. With these deep analytic capabilities our customers around the world can better understand, anticipate and shape business outcomes.