Egged Transportation becomes a data-driven organisation with Tableau

This article was created by our partner, G-Stat. It originally appeared here. 

Egged Transportation Ltd. is one of the world’s largest private public transportation companies, with operations serving over 1M daily passengers in Israel, the Netherlands and Poland. Egged is Israel’s largest public transportations operator, operating 48% of the country’s public transportation lines, with over 8,500 employees and an estimated annual revenue of $1.2B. Within  the transportation sector, Egged is a market leader and an innovator in a number of fields from Public Transit and Vehicle Maintenance to the operation of Tel Aviv’s first Lightrail train, pioneering Mobility as a Service (MaaS) in several cities throughout Israel and industry-leading R&D.

We spoke with Yoni Polakowsky, Head of BI and Analytics at Egged about the company's journey to becoming a data-driven organisation. 

First, it’s critical to point out that Egged was gold in terms of the volume and quality of data accumulated over the years. Data sources included core systems of traffic planning and management, meta-management systems, and tens of thousands of IoT devices. As a result, departments presented processed information in Excel that took a long time to produce, and each manager presented the data according to his organizational truth. Information was not easily accessible, there was virtually no integration and therefore our ability to analyze data was quite limited. 

I arrived at Egged a year ago, shortly after a new BI system was implemented – Tableau. The company’s CIO, Nina Gispan, chose Tableau as the tool for analytics and organizational inquiry after extensive examination of other leading products on the market. Tableau was chosen mainly due to a need for rapid implementation; it’s an intuitive, user-friendly tool with a high level of visualization making it ideal for large-scale operationalization across a large enterprise such as Egged. It was also critical to choose a tool with advanced analytics capabilities and integration with a large variety of databases.

My first task was to transform years of data accumulated across many disparate systems and turn it into meaningful knowledge we could use to make business decisions – with the help of Tableau. The ambition was to empower Egged’s senior management and mid-level management with the ability to make better, data-based decisions to propel the company forward and optimize operational performance.

Tableau Implementation partner 'G-Stat' played a key role in helping us by assisting to transform and run our businesses simply. The system went live about 2 years ago, when the implementation process included Consult by G-Stat experts and ongoing support to this day, which provides a full professional umbrella for solving and implementing Best Practices.

Our highest goal continues to be transforming Egged into a data-driven organization. That is, the creation of a unified ecosystem in which all business units speak the same language and reflect the same organizational truth – to enhance our ability to make bigger, better decisions. Proper data processing and accessibility can and should be a key tool for continuous improvement, across the organization. We needed a centralized, integrated tool and we knew this would require collaboration across our Technology and Business units. 

Today, 18 months since the system went live, it is used across the organization horizontally and vertically, across every business unit and level of management. First, it’s become a tool to reflect business activity and project management. It is used to make data-based managerial decisions both at a project level, and in day-to-day business activities. In addition, Tableau is used by analysts to identify anomalies and opportunities for business improvement.

Egged operates a vehicle maintenance system which includes hundreds of employees and a large array of garages across a wide geographic area. We consider the maintenance system a major growth engine, so we needed a research tool to continuously identify profitability opportunities. 

To fulfill this need, we created an integrated interrogation model in Tableau that allows for profitability analysis at all levels of the various garages, down to the employee level, work cell and even on an hourly level. Using an advanced model like this and with clear goal setting, Enables management decisions based on very accurate information to allow for operational efficiency.

We wanted to give all of our business units access to the data we had collected, quickly and easily. We set up a responsive BI portal with access to all reports, which is also available on mobile through the Tableau app. It is used by employees and managers who are outside the office, at work sites, in meetings, and working from home – allowing them access by mobile and tablet, depending on their work and device preference. To make this happen, we took a systems-thinking approach, designing the necessary infrastructure both from a communication as well as security standpoint (we use OKTA). Since many Egged employees work outside the office, this effort helped solve long-standing issues of access to information. Overall, the project marks a significant milestone on our strategic roadmap toward becoming a data-driven organization.