NS innovates payment methods with High Availability High Performance platform

The Dutch have quite a habit of complaining about public transport. But nowhere in the world is the railway so heavily used as in our country. NS is among the top three in the world when it comes to accurate timetable implementation. NS' service is also distinctive in other areas. Such as the way you can plan and pay for your door-to-door public transport journey in the Netherlands, whether you use another transport company's train for the first and/or last leg, switch to bus or tram, or use a shared car or scooter. "When you realize how fragmented Dutch public transport is and how complex it is to facilitate door-to-door travel, it is really quite extraordinary to see what all these parties are realising together", says Ruud Mourik, programme manager at NS. 

The same applies to the ease of payment that NS offers its passengers. They pay with their OV-chipkaart, which is linked to a private or business season ticket, or with their debit card (EMV/OV Pay). Passengers using different transport companies only have to pay once; NS settles the amount with the other public transport companies in the background. For passengers, it could hardly be any easier. To safeguard the same level of payment convenience for the future and keep up with new developments, it was necessary to modernize the software handling the order-to-cash process and move it to a platform with higher availability and performance. 

Ruud is currently the responsible Programme Manager for the SAP migration of the order-to-cash process, a major project consisting of several sub-projects. "We started to modernize the billing environment back in 2015. That part of the project went live in 2018", he says.  

This marked the completion of the back end of the payment process. But NS also wanted to make it easier at the front-end for customers to do business with NS. Broadly speaking, NS customers can be divided into three groups: individuals with a season ticket (NS Flex), companies with a season ticket (NS Business Card), and occasional passengers without a season ticket. Ruud explains: "Our customers can purchase and manage their tickets or season tickets online or via an app. They can also view their travel transactions and invoices there. In the back end, these portals are linked to SAP CRM and SAP BRIM."  

Previously, these SAP environments were covered by a 'gold' service contract. "In practice, this means that the portals for our passengers are contractually permitted quite a lot of downtime on an annual basis. We wanted to significantly increase the availability of the portals for our passengers, which meant that the environment needed to be more stable, with higher performance and availability. In addition, the impact of maintenance and upgrades on the uptime of the systems had to be significantly reduced", Ruud summarizes the ambition.

"This is why it was decided to migrate SAP BRIM from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA and move to a new data centre with a 'platinum' HS/HP (High Availability, High Performance) service. 

While NS is making the move to SaaS applications where possible, this was not yet possible for SAP S/4HANA BRIM", says Ruud. "We use such a large number of special features that migration to SAP private Cloud-based BRIM is not yet feasible. The functionality we need is simply not yet available." 

NS does expect cloud-like behaviour from the application, which is not cloud-native. "This does require some architectural tricks in the back end," says Raoef Hayatmahomed, senior manager of IT operations at myBrand Conclusion, NS' long-standing SAP partner. You can't just run the software on any infrastructure. For that reason, Raoef enlisted the help of one of the sister companies in the Conclusion ecosystem: Conclusion Mission Critical, specialists in creating and managing mission-critical environments that need to be accessible 24/7.  

While Conclusion Mission Critical focused on building the High Availability High Performance platform (HAHP), myBrand Conclusion is responsible for setting up the new BRIM environment. Conclusion Mission Critical and myBrand Conclusion collaborate closely in the preparation phase, during the migration and in the administration phase that follows. So closely, in fact, that Ruud barely notices that two companies are involved in the project. “They operate as a single company. Participants from NS, myBrand Conclusion and Conclusion Mission Critical worked together as a single team throughout the project", he notes with satisfaction.

The project thus consists of two migrations: an infrastructure migration to the HAHP platform in the Conclusion Mission Critical cloud and a software migration from SAP ECC BRIM to SAP S/4HANA BRIM. "We're talking 50 to 60 terabytes of data, all of which had to be moved", says Ruud with a smile.  Many colleagues found the project to be a challenging prospect due to the sheer scope and complexity, but Ruud and his team had the situation under control. "I've been doing this type of migration project for thirty years. The most important thing is to test everything to the finest detail. Conclusion Mission Critical and myBrand Conclusion are well aware of this fact. We were completely on the same page in that respect."  

Five or six trial migrations were conducted prior to the actual migration. Ruud explains: "You bump into new issues each time. We didn't have enough bandwidth in the first trial, for example, so it took far too long to migrate all the data. We also ran into some security issues. Once we had tackled those, new challenges surfaced. You improve incrementally until you're in full control and ready for the actual migration." 

And yet, these challenges had no impact on the project lead time. The migration was scheduled for the last week of June 2023. "But circumstances made it more convenient to bring the go-live date forward by a week", explains Ruud. "This did mean having to rearrange all sorts of private schedules, including that of one of the key players at myBrand Conclusion who had his birthday on the Friday night of our launch. This too is indicative of the commitment of all stakeholders."  

On a Friday night in June, the time had finally come. "We had announced that the project would take until Monday end of day at the latest – three full days – but we were done at 3 o'clock on Sunday afternoon and were able to take the customer portals live there and then", he says with a twinkling of pride in his eyes.

As mentioned, the three organizations worked together as if they were a single company. Ruud explains: "The project leader of myBrand Conclusion was in our office two or three days a week. Lines of communication were very short, and still are to this day." 

Although Ruud is very pleased in this regard, experience teaches that such a close-knit relationship between customer and supplier has its downside. "Whereas other suppliers can be very procedural about it when we have a problem, myBrand Conclusion first goes to work to fix it and only checks whether they are actually responsible for it afterwards. Sometimes, the cause that something isn't going as expected is us, NS. It is wise to increase governance in this regard. Not to make it complex or laborious, but to keep track of what work has been done by whom and who should pay the bill." This too marks the good relationship between the three organisations.

When the morning rush hour started on the Monday morning after the migration, the new systems were heavily strained. In addition to the everyday load, three days of work had to be caught up on. Additional systems were activated during full operation. "Although a lot of time had been spent testing the load, the behaviour of the whole of the Netherlands boarding the train is harder to replicate", says Edward. "Especially because the architecture of the landscape, and therefore the behaviour of the applications, had changed significantly. The systems continued to be tuned in full operation both functionally and technically, and systems were modified and restarted, without the passenger noticing a thing."  

After several weeks of hard work, performance had improved significantly and all processes had been optimally tuned to the new situation.  

With the migration from SAP BRIM to S/4 HANA on the HAHP platform, NS is ready for the next step. We will be hearing more about this soon, says Ruud. "Passengers can already pay with their bank card via OVpay, but only at full fare. The same payment method will be available for season tickets in the near future. Instead of requiring an OV-chipkaart, you'll be able to travel via a mobile ‘pass’ on your phone or smartwatch instead." 

And that is probably not the end of it. "The world of public transport is changing rapidly at the moment. Mobility-as-a-Service is one example, where you plan your journey from door to door in a single app. These applications are booming. They are going to greatly change the way we travel by public transport and the way we pay for that travel. It will be much more pleasant for our passengers and the convenience of travelling by public transport instead of by car contributes to a more mobile and sustainable Netherlands. Our new platform marks a big step towards that future", concludes Ruud.