BEST PRACTICE: Ecolines

ECOLINES is the biggest passenger carrier in the Baltic States, providing bus rides to 21 countries and more than 200 cities across Eastern and Western Europe. The company is already running business in the passenger transport market for 20 years. During this time ECOLINES has proven ability to provide high-quality services and on regular bases enhances their efficiency, becoming one of the largest and most successful Latvian companies.

The Challenge

There was a need to improve internal communication between buses and operators to synchronize ticket sales on the internet with a passenger list and location of the buses if any assistance was needed.

The task of the project – develop company’s internal system controllable and manageable by the ECOLINES operators.

The Solution

Ecolines Operators Workspace (OWS) is an interactive information system, designed to improve passenger carrier’s ECOLINES operator’s efficiency and customer service. The system allows to receive and organize data about trip and other related information (movements of the bus, stops, route, passenger list, tickets, etc.). In OWS realization was used ELS (ECOLINES Loyalty System) functional architecture developed before.

ECOLINES OWS basic functions:

• provide data about bus movements, stops, routes, passengers, tickets and other information, as well as perform their filtration;
• to represent geographic readings on interactive map (location of the bus, route, movement).

Applied technologies

Wireless Technologies, Automation Technologies, Cloud computing

Data visualization. Laravel, AngularJS, PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Google Maps API

Implementation process

The solution was implemented by company MIDIS. In the implementation of the project participated coordinator, programmer, designer and tester. The work was organized with Agile methodology.

In the work process was created list forms of the bus stops, passengers, agents, garages, journey and tickets details.

ECOLINES OWS system was developed using Google Maps API tools and methods that lets display geographic information what makes possible to create personalized ECOLINES information environment.

Information environment contains detailed information about each bus movement and composition:

• Location
• Quantity of passengers
• List of bus garages
• Route stops
• Purchased tickets
• Information about ECOLINES agents and their location

Results and Benefits

Information about every route is regularly coordinated and operator is aware of the bus location or driving situations such as delays, changes caused by traffic restrictions and other.

ECOLINES OWS provides access to diverse and voluminous data, therefore, it is for the filtering, processing, data exports in XLS format and insertion in a specific form, so operator can work with the necessary information, such as specific data combinations.

These options allow to track the company’s productivity, because the resulting data represents bus regularity and precision, thus it is possible successfully plan the future routes.

ECOLINES operators work efficiency improvement

• Convenient application design
• Clarity of data
• Filtration
• Widget diversity in interactive map
• Movement visualization in real time
• Operational speed

Additional benefits

• New markets – it is much easier to buy tickets and there is no necessity to coordinate it with bus parks and ticket offices.
• Operation time reduction up to 4 times, saving human resources and reducing costs.
• Total cost reduction of the process using the system is 10 to 20 percent.