Where do you feel the North American transit industry is as far as understanding the information found within its data? Do you think this understanding will grow in the short-term?
Our industry has seen an amazing transformation in both the availability and adoption of technology in really a short time span compared to other industries. The negative impact has been that there is so much data available that it’s harder than ever to separate the signal from the noise. Fortunately, there are agencies leading the way in data-driven decision making and they are being staffed with individuals well suited to navigate this new landscape. At the same time, technology vendors are getting better at presenting answers about how an agency is performing as compared to hundreds of thousands individual pieces of data.
I do believe the understanding is growing rapidly and it will continue to grow. The most important takeaway is that all this data doesn’t change the important metrics, it just makes measurement of them so much more accurate.
Why is it important to take a centralized approach to data?
I think the best way to answer this question is with asking yourself these questions:
- What reports does your agency depend on per month/yearly?
- What does it take/process and compile the data?
- What is confidence level of the data you're compiling and reporting?
- Lastly, if you had to pull a comprehensive report for the board in a moment’s notice and you needed ridership, revenue and employee information could you pull it off?
Many agencies live this nightmare on a regular basis. Data coming from multiple systems and the pain staking effort it takes to compile. Because of disparate software systems, departments working in silos and not having exposure to the complete picture makes this a difficult task.
Having a centralized approach for collecting data would give many CEO’s a higher level of confidence and peace of mind.
How can teams begin their shift to enterprise thinking?
Easy, stop thinking about it and ask us about myAvail Enterprise Transit Management System.
This essentially means we have combined our feature rich CAD/AVL system with the industries only transit focused Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, to offer the only fully integrated system available in the industry.
The industry has been rapidly adopting the MaaS model, so passengers can see how the entire transportation network works together to solve the problem of how to navigate their environment. myAvail ETMS is solving the same problem for the Transit Industry’s back-office systems.
Imagine if an agency is having difficulty meeting schedule commitments and is forced to cancel trips. The transportation department may report what service has been missed, the customer service department can report on the impacts to customers, maintenance can report on equipment availability and human resources can report on staff availability. Enterprise thinking teaches us to look at the total ecosystem not at these individual parts, so all efforts can be focused on the agency’s goals not the departments objectives.
With myAvail ETMS in place, you’ll be able to see things like payroll and inventory, and driver start times and bus maintenance side-by-side in one system, rather than having to make multiple requests, then spend time figuring out how to reconcile the data.
