Transport for NSW uses Agile Analytics and Azure to harness the power of data and improve customer services across New South Wales

Providing safe, efficient transport systems across New South Wales

Transport for NSW offers bus, ferry, light rail, and metro services across the metropolitan and rural areas of New South Wales, Australia. Private contractors provide most of these services and are monitored to ensure they meet performance measures. Transport is in the early stages of executing its Future Transport 2056 Strategy with a planned budget of $41.5 billion. 

Sandeep Mathur, Program Manager at Transport for NSW, explains, “The Multi-Modal Performance Reporting Program is one of the first programs to harness the power of data to improve customer services and manage the performance of bus, ferry, light rail, and metro operators.” 

In addition to monitoring performance, the program gives Transport better insights into how services are being provided with the ability to deep-dive into issues and work with operators to improve services. To help execute its vision, Transport for NSW turned to Agile Analytics. 

Turning data into insights for data-driven decision making

Based in Sydney, Agile Analytics is a Microsoft Gold Partner specializing in delivering data solutions powered by the Microsoft data platform. 

“Our aim is to help organizations take advantage of the modern data platform to gain better insights into their business and drive a culture of data-driven decision making. The Microsoft Azure platform and Power BI give us the tools we need to achieve this,” said Iman Eftekhari, Owner and Director of Agile Analytics. “We normally start with our Discovery Workshop to understand the requirements and define a roadmap, followed by the implementation phase using our Data Insights iterative approach to focus on building a solution for one business area at a time.“

As a large government enterprise, Transport uses an array of data systems. After an extensive evaluation of available platforms, the company chose to build its operational data lake on Microsoft Azure.  

Improving transport services with Agile Analytics and Microsoft Azure

Azure Data Warehouse holds Transport’s operational data lake, Azure Data Factory handles data ingestion, Azure Analysis Services build the analytical models, and Power BI delivers reporting and analytics. The platform can ingest data arriving from IoT devices on vehicles as well as from operators’ overnight feeds. 

“I find the big data technology is evolving fast and Microsoft as an organization has provided great support to our program. For analytics and reporting, we have both data at-rest and in-motion and the Azure-based solution is scaling really well for us,” Mathur said. 

With Agile Analytics’ Data Insights solution on Azure, Transport can evaluate the performance of each operator to understand what is happening on the network on any day. The solution helps Transport identify endemic issues and work with operators to resolve them while providing the ability to drill down to every trip and stop to inform conversations. Additionally, Power BI dashboards are shared with operators to facilitate full transparency into whether performance is meeting contractual obligations while identifying areas of improvement. 

“The Microsoft Azure data platform and Power BI give us the ability to have a big data solution, ingesting millions of data points a day, sometimes arriving in 10-second intervals, and be able to drill down to the finest grain where we can see every stop of every trip is a very powerful tool for managing and improving the public transport service that Transport for NSW provides,” Eftekhari said.