Iuliia Tore Russian Railways has developed a policy for the digitisation of all processes and invites all interested partners in this field to cooperate.
Oleg Belozerov, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Russian Railways, made this announcement on 12 September 2018.
“It is impossible to organise rail transport today without using digital technologies. We want to utilise these technologies to attract new customers and offer completely new services, and not just rail services. Seamless intermodal transportation technologies are something that we will definitely be applying in the near future,” said Oleg Belozerov.
According to Belozerov, the Company has adopted the basic documents on digitalisation and implemented a programme for the introduction of digital technologies.
With regard to freight transport, digitalisation involves, among other things, creating an integrated system of customer relationship management, including the electronic trading platform Freight Transportation, which allows paperless and remotely ordered transportation from point A to point B.
Thanks to information on the location of wagons not owned by Russian Railways and the availability of the freight base, it has become possible to use the rolling stock and railway infrastructure more efficiently and minimise empty wagon runs.
“Today, we are already seeing how effective this service is: nearly 3,000 shippers have subscribed to the site, and the turnover now amounts to more than 10 billion roubles,” said Oleg Belozerov.
Belozerov also stressed that the introduction of digital technologies could reduce significantly the time required to implement all operations, which is one of the main customer requirements.
The site provides an end-to-end service, including multimodal connections and warehousing services.This range of services will expand in the future.
According to the CEO of Russian Railways, a similar approach to digitalisation is also being brought to bear on the passenger side of the business.
The mobile platform enables passengers to book tickets, including for multimodal routes, and order taxis, book hotels and other services.
In addition, Russian Railways is implementing a number of IT services for the Company’s employees, in particular, a mobile application for staff who work on serving the infrastructure. This app provides operational information on the need for the maintenance or repair of particular parts of the infrastructure and makes it possible to transmit reporting data.
Taking into account the fact that Russian Railways has a huge amount of information on freight and passenger transportation at its disposal, the use of technologies involving Big Data has great potential.
“The railways today are the biggest owner of information. We have a huge range of work ahead of us and face ambitious tasks, but we can cope with them by using digital technologies and the amount of information that we have,” said Oleg Belozerov.
