SITA: Transport delivered with excellence and quality
Covering over 82,000,000 km in 2006, 1500 buses and more than 2200 employees in Italy, SITA has a drive to deliver the highest quality service to its customers. In order to continue its high standards and strive to meet customers needs SITA is extending its transport network and links to include local, national and European services.
SITA is owned by the Italian rail operator Ferrovie dello Stato, and is working closely with train operator Trenitalia, to continually extend and integrate the bus and rail services offered to its clients.
BOARD: Information in the hands of the users and the business
“The complexities of supporting a national and regional network make the management of our organisation much more complex than a standard transport company,” comments Andrzej Kapturkiewicz, ICT Manager, SITA. “The corporate group controls the regional divisions, and as such must centrally consolidate ALL company information including; Financial, HR, Customer, Technical and Commissions. As the information is on different hardware and software platforms as well as various different applications, the consolidating the data is more complex.”
“Before implementing BOARD,” continues Kapturkiewicz “there were elements missing, resulting in management not having access to an immediate view of company performance. BOARD was selected to support financial processes, data integration, reporting, analysis and graphical representation of information. We started by supporting the needs in our Finance departments and thanks to BOARD’s simplicity and versatility it has been rapidly been adopted by other areas of the business.”
- HR analyisis and management
- Finanacial Management and controlling
- Budgeting / Planning / Forecasting
- Spare parts and maintenance analysis
- Sales and Marketing analysis
“BOARD has allowed users to analyse Key Performance Indicators and drivers by dynamically navigating on the fly (drill down and drill across) through information to get a picture of the business without having to go back to the IT department.”
Human Resources (HR) Management and Payroll
The HR department has used BOARD extensively to analytically look at different personnel functions from salaries, commissions, attendance and resource planning. Some examples are:
- Full cost of personnel analysis down to the individual payment detail and breakdown of primary costs, cost of accessories etc (consolidated and 12 months)
- Overtime analysis
- Absenteeism analysis (sick leave, injuries, holidays, strikes)
- Personnel mapping and trending
- Career Path Development (CPD) - monitoring and analysis (by employee)
- Full shift analysis
Analytical Accounting – Activity Based Costing, Budgeting (Balance Sheet / P&L), Planning
Managing the finance for a transport company is quite different from that of typical organisations. With BOARD, SITA is now able to monitor and manage two key areas of the business: Responsibility Centre and Business Lines.
The function of the Responsibility Centre is to manage the profit and loss, allowing SITA to monitor the profitability of the individual areas of the business. Whereas the Business Lines manage the various activities needed to deliver a service.
The SITA Business Lines are:
- Local bus city transport
- Support Sevices
- Rentals
- National / International / Gran Tourism
- Travel Agents
- Ships
- Transportation
“Monitoring the profitability of our Business Lines is critical to our organisation.” comments Kapturkiewicz “This was challenging considering the multitude and geographical spread of our services. BOARD integrates the data from our disparate back-end systems to provide a single corporate view of our company information.”
Kapturkiewicz continues, “In such a complex environment the budgeting process by Business Lines and Responsibility Centre’s would be time consuming and very difficult to manage had it not been for BOARD. It has provided us with full analytical capabilities, the ability to support data entry and what-if simulations to manage the full budgeting and planning processes. We are also able to analyse, forecast and plan our group cash flow, even though the data is coming from disparate Financial and ERP systems. We use the entities listed below to forecast and model the impact of changes to the cash flow position.”
- Receivables
- Payments
- Orders
- Purchase Orders (materials and services)
- Cost Shifts (i.e. increase price of fuel and spare parts)
Technical Division
The technical division of SITA includes the following sectors and activities:
- Vehicle Maintenance (scheduled and non scheduled)
- Fuel consumption and mileage analysis
- Spare parts analysis
- Management of tyres
- Management of uniforms
- Management of vehicle rescue and breakdowns
- Management of third party services
BOARD provides the following full analysis and specific Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) for this division:
- Average vehicle mileage
- Consumption by vehicle types
- Tyre analysis
- Cost of spare parts analysis - by vehicle
- Garage costs - by Business Line
- Maintenance Activity Based Costing
Sales & Marketing
With SITA’s services regionalised (presently across 6 regions) it is important that there is a single view. Kapturkiewicz comments, “SITA relies on various hardware and software platforms for ticketing, point of sales (POS), different types of company and company pools. BOARD has become the central hub for information providing a single analytical view of sales.” By the following areas:
- Ticket, routes, product, type of ticket, journeys, ticket type and class
- Rolling year analysis
- Earning allocations between pools and consortiums
- Packaged holiday by type and tour operator
- Quality Control – Full analysis of timeliness of services
- What-if modeling of staff allocation and shift patterns
Leveraging IT to support and improve business requirements and processes
“As well as providing a single integrated view of company information in such a complex environment as ours, other key benefits of the BOARD toolkit have been the rapid implementation and high user satisfaction. In less than 12 months we have delivered a pervasive Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management environment across the business and various business processes from Finance & Controlling to HR, to Sales & Marketing to Operations amongst others.”
Kapturkiewicz continues, “Thanks to the user friendliness of the BOARD toolkit the business users have been highly impressed with the solution and continually look at new ways and areas for us to use the tool. Whilst before business users would often try to create local personal databases to analyse from, they are now able to access this information for themselves easily from the BOARD central environment. BOARD has enabled IT to leverage the company data and support the business needs, thus creating real value in the company information.”