SAP Helps Keep Russian Railways on the Right Track

Russia’s largest transportation service provider will get even bigger if it successfully acquires Greece’s state-owned train system, TRAINOSE. One of three bidders announced Monday, Russian Railways (RZD) would add to its Eurasian transportation network a €30 million system that moves 15 million passengers and 4.5 million tons of freight each year.

SAP helps Russian Railways centralize all of its data from a network that spans 11 time zones.

That’s a lot to keep track of, but RZD has an advantage. The Moscow-based transport company already moves 1 billion passengers and 1.4 billion tons of freight on a network that spans 11 time zones with the help of SAP ActiveEmbedded.

SAP Embedded improves users’ ability to implement and operate cutting-edge technologies and innovations. The combination of a support team — embedded with the customer — and engineering services help make the ActiveEmbedded offering stand out.

“SAP ActiveEmbedded support really helped us during the transfer project, and allowed us to implement SAP HANA in the shortest timeframe,” Elena Raskita, an SAP BI consultant for RZD affiliate OCRV, told SAP TV. “They assisted us in installing the system and ran a series of training courses, which helped us better transfer the existing solutions to BW on HANA solutions.”

RZD can now make more informed decisions faster than ever. And SAP HANA reduced the company’s monthly cost distribution analysis time from three days to 20 minutes.

“The company’s report generation process is quite complex, multidimensional and labor intensive, Aleksandr Biryukov, RZD’s deputy head of management accounting, told SAP TV. “One factor in raising our efficiency was selecting SAP HANA to speed up report generation and information analysis.”

The SAP HANA database runs the company’s analytical reporting five times faster than before — and it RZD’s volume of stored information is now three times smaller.

“The main advantage we see is having centralized information for all of Russian Railways,” Biryukov said, “down to unit financial data and detail.”

With all of RZD’s data now under control, acquiring TRAINOSE shouldn’t be a problem.

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