How intelligent transportation systems are changing the industry

Understand the traveler's interests

Understanding the traveler’s interests will enable vendors to suggest travel plans that keep travelers on time while offering them new options to explore and learn. Spend your layover in an airport lounge, if you like. Or, how about lunch at a four-star restaurant with time left to browse the local bazaar? A travel app could suggest that and provide the details.

Ecosystems of travel, transportation and hospitality companies are moving to make this happen, and much more. Those who best understand how to localize and personalize journeys with data-driven precision, and that can find problems in advance and fix them, will earn the traveler’s loyalty.

A dynamic journey

Travel is consumed in real time and subject to a customer’s changing whims as well as obstacles encountered along the way. Meeting times change. Flights are cancelled or delayed. Or we simply feel inspired to add another leg to a journey.

What’s more, travelers pass through radically different environments along the travel continuum, with different suppliers, channels, regulations, currencies and payment options.

All of this makes delivering a flawless, well-integrated experience an enormous industry challenge. To deliver that experience, the industry will have to develop a connected transportation system that offers equal participation and access to all industry members and puts the customer in the center of the vision, not legacy protocols and formats. It must be able to serve the individual across companies and channels, starting with the flight system, coordinating with airport-wide retail systems, and connecting to hotels and local service providers.

On the cargo side, the same challenges apply. It’s critical for organizations to have full visibility into the freight journey, as goods move from the distribution center, to a freight forwarder or third-party logistics company, to delivery. This is complicated by the transportation industry’s shift to an intermodal approach. Companies must now maintain visibility across all locations and modes of transport.

As transformation sweeps the industry, it is clear that many conventions will have to be reevaluated, and some even turned on their head.

Watch how Scandinavian Airlines uses analytics insights to improve customer experience.

Destination: Business transformation

Most transportation companies have mission-critical platforms that contain valuable data, but they are reluctant to bridge these systems for fear of losing their value proposition. Those monolithic processes and siloed data-hoarding strategies no longer work.

Business transformation is about becoming part of an ecosystem that not only shares data, but also delivers context and intent. What’s needed is a digital enablement strategy. Business transformation is built around an information architecture that enables companies to look across a chain of travel events for an individual customer or package to identify problems, predict the impact and automatically develop and execute solutions that keep passengers and freight moving.

New services can be built around a platform like this that help companies differentiate their offerings or add value in new ways, through mobile tracking solutions, or by using analytics to improve warehousing fulfillment and distribution. For example, sensors in a refrigerated freight car that sense a rise in temperature could trigger a maintenance request to repair a problem or move cargo to another car before it spoils.

Passenger transportation companies can tap into these same tools to find ways to extend their brands and expand into the multiple modes of transportation available to passengers. Digital enablement helps companies understand the full passenger journey and allows for a seamless approach, even if the company is not part of the entire chain of events.

A hotel notified that incoming guests are experiencing delays could offer weary travelers an added comfort or convenience as a way to differentiate its customer service. A tour company notified that a traveler has a long airport layover, and that this traveler loves gourmet food and hand-made crafts, could recommend having lunch at a four-star restaurant and browsing the local bazaar after, and arrange for transportation back to the airport in time for the flight.

Capabilities to provide this level of personalization don’t require wholesale integration. They can be developed and delivered through loosely connected systems that share selected data, understand the most important attributes of a customer’s journey, and have the awareness to detect issues, the context to recognize the impact and the intelligence to take action.

Implement a connected transportation platform

A connected transportation platform comprises elements such as enterprise services, a partner ecosystem, API gateways and infrastructure delivered by scalable hybrid cloud computing, and storage that incorporates external data sources such as internet of things (IoT) sensors and geolocation data from different transport modes. It allows third parties to gain access via an API portal, with software distributed through a microservices marketplace that enables platform members to inform users across different channels. Every element of the platform is connected by ubiquitous, software-defined, secure digital networks.

Companies that are connected to this kind of ecosystem can benefit in multiple ways. Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven analytics can be applied to monitor data streams to identify irregular operations (IROPs) that might have an impact on the delivery time of a package or a customer’s ability to make a flight connection, and initiate actions to mitigate delays. For example, if a small local delivery company were notified that a high-priority package requiring special handling was arriving soon at an airport, it could dispatch a pickup early to account for heavy traffic conditions, thus avoiding late fees and possibly compromising the contents of the package.

Automation and machine learning architectures coupled with microservices and cloud applications make it possible to abstract functions from one industry to create new services in another. Few companies can afford to bear the development cost of an industry platform, but by spreading the cost across participants in a connected transportation platform ecosystem, the entry cost becomes affordable for companies of all sizes.

Solutions developed for the connected transportation platform can reach a broader, bigger audience than solutions built for niche markets. For example, systems that coordinate functions such as maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) share many common features, which means that a vendor building MRO solutions for airlines on the connected transportation platform could enter markets for rail systems, trucks and other transport modes. 

From optimizing runs to optimizing the experience

For many organizations in the travel, transportation and hospitality industry, success is all about “optimizing runs.” Optimizing focuses on getting passengers and cargo from point A to point B faster using less fuel. The two primary factors are efficiency and routing. Whether in the air or on the ground, it’s all about moving passengers and goods at the lowest operational cost. 

That’s why an intermodal perspective is so important. Today, cargo tends to travel from truck to train, to ship, to train, to truck — or some combination thereof. People jump from car to train to bus to airport. Intermodal integration and a full view of the supply chain are essential to today’s travel landscape, and companies must adopt a strategy that embraces this intermodal view.

A connected transportation platform doesn’t abandon optimization, but adds a customer-focused layer to preserve elements that have a direct impact on the travel experience. For example, optimization based on traveler preferences during reaccommodation would include features of the previous flight, such as contiguous family seating or maintaining a preferred level of hotel room in the event of a venue change. If a flight delay will cause a cruise ship boarding to be missed, how can the vacation be salvaged?

Every vendor in the ecosystem that participates can offer travelers an enhanced experience. When your arrival time and gate change, everyone from your car driver to the hotel you will be staying at knows.

Optimizing runs and the experience may mean partnering with a third-party provider to gain a wider perspective. For example, companies can put IoT devices on train tracks and wagons to monitor track condition in real time, and use drones to inspect runways in support of flight operations. It may also mean considering the use of automation and robotics, instead of people, to analyze physical objects in the field and assist with functions such as predictive maintenance.

Manage disruption efficiently

Just as transportation companies must navigate digital disruption, they must also learn how to efficiently manage common industry disruptions, from weather delays and emergency situations to maintenance and repair issues. To handle these challenges, they need a system that alerts them when a disruption occurs, tells them what it affects and suggests how it can be quickly resolved in a way that meets original commitments.

For example, if an emergency occurs at an airport, companies will know immediately how many flights and passengers are affected and what cargo needs to be rerouted. At the same time, passenger communications can be coordinated with operations, alerting customers to the issue at the earliest possible time and making new arrangements and reservations to help them reach their ultimate destination. Actions that exceed customer expectations will help preserve the relationship — and the brand’s reputation. The same applies to shipping operations.

By linking an MRO strategy and other pieces of the puzzle, organizations can get operations back to normal as quickly as possible. Clear visibility into the entire landscape enables enterprises to deal with irregular operations more effectively. Be it rebooking tickets or putting cargo on different planes, dealing with disruptions becomes much easier. And because data has been collected and integrated, enterprises can analyze that information to spot trouble ahead and deal with it in a proactive way.

Build the 21st century enterprise

Digital leaders in travel, transportation and hospitality understand that incremental strategies aren’t enough to address the scale of change in today’s industry. Established companies need to take a fresh view of the industry and develop bold, clean-sheet plans, or face competition from new entrants such as Google, whose multi-modal planning on Google Maps and comprehensive Google Trips products have set the bar for what a consumer-centric approach to travel planning and m0anagement can do.

Solutions such as the connected transportation platform must be a part of those plans. A connected transportation platform brings together an array of resources in a way that supports new revenue models and value-creation streams that shift the focus from what’s good for industry members to what’s good, what’s needed and what’s expected by the end consumers.

In the best-case scenario, tactical and operational information from external and internal sources is ingested, cleaned and validated, and then analyzed to deliver actionable business intelligence that delivers seamless experiences and new benefits for end customers.

With a full review of budget spend and investment goals, you can empower your chosen business outcome, and transform and grow your business. And remember, there are ways to reduce costs and find savings, such as moving noncritical, monolithic systems to the cloud. To fill in the gaps, consider working with a partner that can help guide the journey and provide the experience and tools needed to achieve transformational success.

Differentiation and industry leadership go hand in hand. Stay ahead of the competition by knowing how to use advanced technology and tap into your greatest resource — your data. With this approach, you can move from chasing customers to leading the industry, with customers and competition chasing you.

How DXC can help

With more than 40 years of experience serving the transportation industry, DXC Technology provides mission-critical systems for top airline, consumer travel, freight and logistics, railway and hospitality firms. As the travel, transportation and hospitality industry undergoes a digital metamorphosis, DXC offers customized solutions for modernizing aging infrastructure, running mission-critical systems, and helping IT adapt to industry consolidation and commoditization, as well as to the always-on consumer.

The DXC Connected Transportation Platform supports rail, air, truck and maritime operations and includes services such as fleet management, geolocation awareness and maintenance solutions. As one of the world’s leading airline IT services providers, DXC helps airlines bring new revenue streams to market, drive efficiency and reduce costs. Also, we help freight and logistics companies achieve end-to-end visibility into the supply chain.

DXC also offers a suite of applications that efficiently integrate flight operations-related systems and help improve employee decision making. Real-time flight, aircraft and station information increases productivity, generates cost savings and provides updates that improve operational awareness. In addition, DXC’s disruption management solution lets airlines manage travel disruptions with the automatic generation of recovery solutions.

The DXC Connected Transportation Platform solution enables interaction with customers to influence passenger movement, improve retail interactions through contextual analytics, and improve efficiency during moments of engagement between airport operations, retailers, airlines, ground transportation and customers.

DXC delivers innovative business and technology solutions that enable business transformation. With our integration-focused, industry-specific solutions, organizations can enhance efficiency, improve traveler experiences, and create new services and revenue sources.

Now is the time to act. Don’t be disrupted, be the disruptor. Let us help you innovate and transform to differentiate with speed and quality.

Learn more at dxc.technology/travel

About the author

Horst Stohrer is the chief technologist of consumer travel at DXC Technology, where he oversees current and future technology development across products and services. Horst is currently focused on using the next generation of breakthrough technologies in hardware and software algorithms to improve travel. This work has resulted in a breakthrough retail product for airline availability processing. Using an application developed in conjunction with HP Labs, the product gives airlines an affordable method of controlling seat availability in real time. 

Contributors

Chris Daniel, mapping consultant, Leading Edge Forum

Jerry Overton, data scientist and industrialized AI lead, DXC Technology, and DXC Fellow