TCS Crystallus™ for railways

Overview

The main business goal for railway companies is to deliver enhanced customer satisfaction through operational reliability, cost-efficiency, and an attractive service offering.

This includes a range of end-to-end choices, journey times, and service frequency. Imperatives for a good service quality are reliable transit times—a direct function of network and service design, high availability, vehicles, equipment and crew utilization, efficient train operations execution and effective customer communication. It is also important to keep the operating ratio low while driving customer satisfaction. 

This requires effective planning and operations of various assets, including infrastructure (linear assets and properties), rolling stock, equipment, and workforce. It necessitates a shift from silos to enterprise-wide integrated and automated processes and systems. To address this requirement in an asset-intensive industry, TCS offers Crystallus™ for railways–a preconfigured industry solution for faster S/4HANA adoption.

As railway organizations increasingly rely on SAP for their corporate functions, managing physical assets requires significant levels of customization. This makes adopting S/4HANA a challenge. As SAP plans the sunset on its legacy enterprise ERP Central Component (ECC) suite, customers need to decide on newer enterprise platforms. However, adopting the new S4/HANA stack requires railway enterprises to choose from multiple upgrade paths, such as brownfield and greenfield implementations. 

TCS Crystallus for railways, underpinned by our railway domain expertise and contextualized knowledge of more than 25 years, helps accelerate and de-risk digital transformation programs.

A preconfigured industry reference solution, TCS Crystallus is built on SAP S/4HANA and the SAP cloud platform to enable consulting-led business transformations. Using more than 330 preactivated SAP Fiori content, the SAP asset manager leverages industry and SAP best practices to address key strategies, trends, and unique requirements of railways.

The preconfigured solution comprises assets inventory, assets strategic planning, maintenance program and plans, maintenance planning, and execution. This helps focus on enterprise asset management, fixed properties, projects, and portfolio management with the aim of maximizing asset availability. Further, delivering these processes across 10 business areas offers complete ecosystem coverage.

Our solution

TCS Crystallus is contextualized for datasets, processes, and organizational elements specific to railways to create pre-configured reference solutions that are easily deployable in customer environments or as a service on cloud.

Organizations can overlay localized processes on this base reference for a strong foundational solution. TCS Crystallus includes a jump-start kit comprising a template repository, business process master list, business process flows and documents, test scripts, and security roles to accelerate transformation.

In addition, Crystallus integrates with other TCS proprietary intelligent solutions, including Intelligent Rail Digital Management and Intelligent Rail Network Access Management Solution, to provide actionable insights on asset conditions. This enables smart predictive maintenance and optimized planning for network maintenance. The solution also integrates with the geographic information system using Geographic Enablement Framework for linear and fixed assets.

Benefits

TCS Crystallus offers a plethora of benefits.

Digital core foundational solution: Serves as a ready digital core solution for railway enterprise business functions and integrates AI-ML-based intelligent analytics solutions for future-proofing

Enhanced time to market: Accelerates S/4HANA transformation program by up to 40% with the help of pre-configured reference solutions and embedded jump-start kit

Improved business agility: Enables benefit realization ahead of time and faster time to deliver benefits with a show and tell solution contextualized for the railway enterprise

Minimized risk: Drives stakeholder confidence and minimizes the risk of business disruption for transformation programs with readily demonstrable S/4HANA solution instance for complex railway enterprise processes

Continuous innovation: Provides access to industry best practices, standardized processes, and industry innovations