After an implementation project led by SJ’s own project management team with support from Sqills, SJ transitioned from its 30-year-old sales and inventory system to S3 Passenger, the leading dynamic pricing, inventory management, and reservation system provided and hosted by Sqills.

A move towards digitalisation

SJ needed a modern solution to introduce new customer offerings while also improving on the current customer experience. The shift to S3 Passenger is considered an important milestone in SJ being able to even further adapt their award-winning digital channels to the wishes and needs of their customers and passengers.

The project has benefited from the close partnership between Sqills and SJ, supported by the agile methodology used throughout. For Sqills it was important to understand SJ’s overall business needs in order to define the target architecture, configuration, and migration strategy with SJ. Both parties relied on the extensive experience of Sqills consultants in terms of managing a project, and the early and thorough preparation from SJ.

A move towards OSDM

The go live with SJ is another important step in the promotion of the OSDM (Open Sales and Distribution Model) standard. The Swedish market made the decision to use OSDM as their interface standard, pushing the development of OSDM even further forward.

To make sure that SJ has multi-inventory capabilities, Sqills created two different adapters: the OSDM-S3 adapter and the S3-OSDM adapter. Partly because of the required work for SJ, it meant S3 Passenger is now able to provide these OSDM interfaces to our operators. This is something that all operators can benefit from going forward.

Pushing the boundaries further

The SJ project was an interesting challenge for several different reasons. One of the more notable is the extra use of Sqills’ journey planner - Navigator II. In terms of journey planning, SJ’s massive reach - selling almost the entire Swedish market - meant that no other operator had quite the same impact when it came to the number of daily departures.

To have a decent understanding of what this meant, look no further than the number of departures and calculations that needed to be managed daily. While smaller operators may have around 40 departures every day and national operators have 900 departures per day, the total number of journey planning options SJ handles can reach over 100.000 per day.

Optimising the journey

A big benefit from the project is that SJ will be pushing the boundaries by offering improved handling and communication in the event of disruptions, that ensure passengers are in for a smoother ride, whatever happens. Even when something unexpected happens, the disruption management features offered in S3 Passenger ensure that passengers will experience the least amount of discomfort.

With the new Booking Manager module, developed by Sqills with SJ business needs as a foundation, handling is based on the complete journey of a booking, making it possible to re-accommodate the exact journey of the customer and not only the conflicted segment. The tools handle multiple bookings in an intuitively constructed interface, easing the amount of work that goes into re-accommodate passengers, and are fully integrated into the SJ ecosystem for communication and control.

All in all, SJ has the options to rebook entire or parts of journeys, re-accommodate or cancel seats within the same train, and actively have an overview of existing conflicts.

And by using the S3 Pricing engine and dynamic pricing capabilities, SJ can ensure they sell each of these tickets at the right time and the right price. The pricing features offered in S3 Passenger help determine ticket prices on dynamic calculations based on determinants and logical expressions, giving SJ full control to price their tickets effectively and efficiently.