Bombela K2 case study

Location: South Africa
Industry: Transportation
Company profile: The Gautrain system is operated and maintained by the Bombela Operating Company under contract to the Bombela Concession Company
Software: K2 workflow, SharePoint 2010 user interface
Solutions: Work permit, traffic incident and CSC blacklisting management
Users: Approximately 250 users currently utilising the system
Benefits: Increased productivity from ease of deployment and system maintenance
Ability to report on and monitor information that affected the day-to-day running of the business and or divisions.

Problem

Bombela had a three-tier need for management of its work permits, traffic incident management and CSC blacklisting.

For work permits, contractors were sending in requests manually, taking up to seven hours to capture data and submit via SharePoint, slowing down the process of development and hindering growth and progress.

Since each traffic incident has various routes to follow, based on the grade submitted by the user, an easy-to-implement workflow was needed to help categorise incidents and direct them to the right person at the right time. Previously, Bombela followed a strategy that required them to print the form, capture data on the paper-based forms, recapture that in Excel, and upload this into a shared folder in SharePoint, a tedious and slow process.

Finally, Bombela needed to revamp its CSC blacklisting management, ensuring no illegal use of cards that are refunded/replaced.

Solution

After significant research, Bombela chose K2 because K2 processes can be easily developed or designed and are versatile enough to provide various details reporting and process management as a tool for the business. K2 partner Kaizen IT played a significant part in assisting Bombela's team, led by Carl Cornelson, Information Technology Manager, in achieving the goals, making the time to understand the environment, helping to deploy reports and increase functionality.

More intricate processes also allowed the reporting and daily operations monitoring to be implemented allowing management and some staff to act accordingly in preventing issues arising and prior to serious matters taking place from an operations perspective. This means needing to provide the right people, at the right time, with the information they needed to make a decision, fast.

Processes have also been designed in K2 for the finance and maintenance divisions, allowing each to proactively report and manage the day to day running of the division.

Instead of slow, manual processes, contractors now submit a work permit request on an external facing site, which starts off the K2 process. Once it is sent through approval stages, it is then authorized by operations when the contractor arrives to do the work the Permit was for. The system also caters for permits that were used for longer than the requested timeframe. This notifies operations and the contractor is then issued with a fine or blacklisted.

Each traffic incident has various routes it can follow, determined by the grade of the user submitting the report. With each direction of the process, the manager of the previous user is notified to approve and alter the information. As the notifications need to go to top management, the operations manager gives final approval and sends it out to the other companies and agencies, saving over six hours by automating the workflow.

For CSC blacklisting, the system does not connect directly to the blacklisting software for the Gautrain system, but it informs finance about the blacklisting.

Finance then processes the request with refunds and other statements regarding the cards. This is then sent to the database administrator, who then blacklists the cards on the Gautrain blacklisting system and completes the process in far less time, saving money and man hours.

To date, Cornelson andhis team have developed approximately 34 different modules at Bombela Operating Company to automate and report on issues in and around the operations, maintenance and finance divisions, integrated with station day-end reporting and financials. With this functionality, finance and operations are able to collaborate to get real-time stats on events or discrepancies and resolve them immediately. This is a major advantage from an operations perspective, eliminating the possibility of human error when doing station day-end and cash-up functions.