Supporting Swiss Federal Railways in Developing Large-scale, Complex IoT Services 

The Challenge

The Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) came to Eraneos as it was looking to push forward in the field of digitization. In doing so, it not only wanted to strengthen its market position but also ensure it could continue being competitive.  
 
To achieve this, SBB had already launched several projects that would see the rollout of various Internet of Things (IoT) services, knowing these would have the potential to add value to the business. Our task was, therefore, to help the organization better assess the challenges in doing this at a large-scale, including helping it with the learning phase in relation to market analyses, such as surveys, proofs of concepts, and pilot projects. 
 
The overall goal was to accompany the project during this extremely complex phase and to contribute additional know-how in the field of IoT. 

The approach

Our first port of call was to focus on supporting SBB in the areas of project and product management. The tasks in this support included bringing in comprehensive strategy and industry expertise as well as methodical approaches, project management and actively helping to shape the concept of the solution. 
  
We used a three-phase approach of “learn, standardize, and scale” to do this. The learning phase included market analyses, requirements surveys, proofs of concept, and pilot projects, all of which were essential to uncover the broad potential of IoT within SBB and better assess the challenges of large-scale use.  
 
Through pilot projects, it was possible (on a small scale) to check whether the planned services also worked in reality. This was conducted via various market, technology, feasibility, and profitability analyses. The learning phase and the further recording of customer needs was the starting point for the creation of a concept for standardizing the offers and automating the processes.  

The result

SBB pushed ahead with setting up the IoT infrastructure on its own by building a scalable IoT infrastructure. With the standardization and automation of processes, an important cornerstone was laid for the provision of IoT services. 

We brought awareness to SBB that IoT projects are multidisciplinary in many respects, and this proved to be crucial to its success. In addition to the obvious core issues, such as software, hardware, and network, we also used know-how and information about the organization’s location in the areas of data analytics, cyber security, and data protection.  
 
Since the current status of the IoT industry shows that the market and the ecosystem are evolving rapidly, Eraneos will continue to support SBB in the future, helping to take the company to the next level.