Arriva London moves to new scheduling system

Migration will help bus company to improve its daily operations

Arriva London has migrated its bus scheduling system from an ageing mainframe to save time and money.

The bus operator was forced to move the scheduling system, which is critical to its daily operations, onto new hardware when support for its central mainframe ceased.

Arriva runs a number of bus routes in the capital, and its bespoke scheduling applications manage crew rosters, route schedules and carry out pay calculations, before feeding the information through to separate payroll systems.

Alan Ricot, Arriva London IT manager says moving these applications onto new hardware without disrupting critical operations and the day-to-day running of processes and staff was essential.

'These systems touch staff from administrative and support staff in the garage right up to the operational director. And each bus driver has a swipe card they use to clock in and out, which also runs alongside these systems,' said Ricot.

Transoft Legacy Liberator software was used to complete the migration onto an IBM xSeries model 255, using Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and a SQL Server 2000 database.

If the systems had been impacted during the move affecting services around the capital, Arriva would have faced fines from Transport for London if the required daily mileage for each route was not achieved.

'This system is critical to us, allowing us to maintain our full mileage and ensure every duty is covered,' said Ricot. 'Data is also extracted from it for reporting and for making up inspectors' log books.'

The company used its existing relationship with systems integrator Capgemini to find suitable hardware and software to complete the migration and maintain the same look and feel to minimise re-training costs.

Having moved from a proprietary database to a relational one through the SQL capability Arriva London now has the ability to use other tools, enabling graphical modelling for example, to update interfaces according to users' roles, and to integrate with other systems for better reporting.