Korus Consulting automated monitoring of performance indicators of the Russian Railways IT block

2024: Automation of monitoring of performance indicators of the Russian Railways IT unit

Korus Consulting Group, as part of expanding the functionality of a large-scale data management system, which has been implemented in Russian Railways since 2017, has created a unit for monitoring and monitoring the performance of the holding's IT unit. Corus Consulting announced this on November 7, 2024.

In 2017, the implementation of the program of projects for the implementation of the control and monitoring system (SKIM of Russian Railways) began. As of November 2024, the solution is integrated with more than 50 source systems, collects and processes more than 2.8 million indicators of the company's activities, and includes about 500 reporting forms for 80 structural divisions of Russian Railways.

At the end of 2023, SKIM was expanded due to the analytical information system SKIM IT, which monitors the key performance indicators of the IT unit of the transport holding. SKIM IT was initiated to improve the efficiency of the IT unit divisions based on the control of their activities.

The efficient use of Big Data in a large organization is impossible without the creation of a management system that will combine information about all aspects of its activities. The implementation of SKIM projects is aimed at solving this problem. The high level of digitalization of Russian Railways allows us to quickly launch a new functionality of the SKIM ecosystem for the purposes of the functional divisions of the holding, "said Kirill Semion, head of the informatization department of Russian Railways.

The KORUS Consulting team conducted a comprehensive survey of divisions and subsidiaries of the IT block to prepare a data model. In total, 67 indicators were selected in key areas of activity: personnel and development, economics and finance, technological processes, security and reliability, customers and markets.

The Enterprise Data Warehouse (CDS), on which IT CIM is built, is based on the Data Vault data storage model, which provides long-term storage of large volumes of heterogeneous information. The Russian analytical system Luxms BI is used for visualization. The product of the same vendor (Luxms, Luxms Logging) is used as an ETL tool.

It is especially important for us that data analysis and visualization are developed on the new platform of the Unified Corporate Data Analysis and Visualization System (EDMS SAD), based on a completely import-substituted technology stack, which ensures the technological stability of the solution. The use of the SAD ECP for analytical tasks of the company will rationalize the use of computing power, reduce the cost of purchasing additional equipment and its modernization, as well as optimize the labor intensity of developing and administering analytical solutions, "said Irina Dolzhenko, chief expert of the informatization department of Russian Railways.

Operational monitoring of the activities of all divisions is a necessary element of the data management system of each successful company. On the scale of Russian Railways, such a decision is the key to the efficiency of the entire holding, so it is so important that each unit has a similar automated tool. SKIM IT provides the management of the holding with operational data to monitor the performance indicators of the Russian Railways IT unit, helps reduce labor costs for collecting data on the performance indicators of the units, receive unified reporting data and use a single approach to information visualization - convenient for the user to perceive, - said Andrey Baybutov, Managing Partner of the Analytical Solutions Department of KORUS Consulting Group.

In the future, it is planned to develop IT CIM in terms of connecting new sources through the Russian Railways QCD and expanding Russian Railways divisions in terms of users and data composition.

2020

Create an analytical reporting system for HR

On December 15, 2020, KORUS Consulting announced that, together with the CRC, they had created an analytical reporting system for the Russian Railways Human Resources Department.

According to the company, domestic software the BI system developed using open source technologies and support allows all heads of the personnel management unit of Russian Railways to quickly collect data about the work transport of the company's personnel.

For a function such as human resource management, it is necessary to constantly be able to see the current situation and make informed decisions based on reliable data. Previously, we spent a lot of time collecting information manually and presented it to the management. As of December 2020, our HR-dashboard product allows us to reduce the time to prepare such reports. The comprehensive analytical system provides the opportunity to see indicators on the personnel portrait of the company, personnel movement, training and assessment of employees and compile ratings of HR services of Russian Railways and make better decisions based on such data. commented Evgeny Braulov, Deputy Head of HR Department of JSCo Russian Railways

KORUS Consulting and the Industry Center for the Development and Implementation of Information Systems (CRC) have developed a centralized analytical reporting system for the company's HR vertical.

Within the framework of the project, a unified methodology for analyzing and visualizing indicators was developed, data was collected from numerous information systems - data sources, a subject area was designed in the data warehouse and dashboards were created for the company's top management and line users.

The system provides ready-made indicators for the personnel portrait of employees, deviations from the plan, work with the personnel reserve and personnel movement (the number of hired and dismissed employees with details by departments, reasons, etc.). The IT solution also quickly collects personnel training, development and evaluation data and provides data on labor discipline. For each indicator, you can see detailed analytics.

An important aspect in the implementation of the system was compliance with the requirements of import substitution, therefore, when developing a solution, preference was given to Russian and freely distributed software. Work was carried out on market research, functional and load testing of various products and technologies in the field of data storage, processing and visualization. Special attention was paid to HR analytics projects, which require in-depth data analysis and should provide the ability to detail to various levels of the organization. structures on a data array in several years. To process and store such volumes of information, free software technologies were selected, and the Luxms BI platform was chosen for visualization. told Yuri Danilov, Deputy Head of the Informatization Department of Russian Railways

As of December 2020, the analytical system is already used by the management of the personnel unit of Russian Railways and is replicated to the level of divisions. The plans include the development of the solution and the addition of functional modules.

Complex analytical projects are always distinguished by a feature related to the scale and complexity of the solution architecture. Building the right profile of employees and collecting all the necessary objective information about them is a doubly difficult task. The success of this project is due not only to our expertise in the field of creating complex solutions for business analysis, but also to the involvement of the Russian Railways and CRC teams. emphasized Andrey Baibutov, Business Development Director, Analytical Solutions Department, KORUS Consulting Group

Establish a KPI system

On October 2, 2020, Korus Consulting Group of Companies announced that, together with the Industry Center for the Development and Implementation of Information Systems (OCRV), it had created a system for analyzing key performance indicators of Russian Railways based on open source technologies and Russian software. The system provides operational monitoring of the activities of a geographically distributed organization, generates analytical reports for the top management to make management decisions. This IT solution meets all import substitution policy requirements.

The variety of information systems, mechanisms for collecting and processing reporting information, a large number of manual operations with data made the preparation of analytics for the top management of Russian Railways a difficult and time-consuming task. The optimization was intended to reduce the cost of providing and supporting the process, standardization and design of end data presentation forms: the format and type of reporting forms and documents, their visibility, convenience of working with them.

In 2017, the implementation of the program of projects for the implementation of the control and monitoring system (CIM) began. For more than three years, a joint team of specialists from KORUS Consulting and the CRC has been evolutionarily building an architecture for working with data using various technologies. In the first years, proprietary products and technologies for storing data, working with them and visualizing them were used to build the system. At the beginning of 2019, in order to fully comply with the requirements of import substitution, a decision was made to develop SKIM projects based on domestic software and open source products.

The geographical distribution and complexity of the transport company's organizational structure, the variety and complexity of business processes have led to strict requirements for the analytical system. The created solution is integrated with more than 46 source systems, collects and processes more than 270 thousand indicators of the company's activities and includes more than 275 reporting forms for 30 structural divisions of Russian Railways as of October 2020. Separate functional blocks of CIM offer opportunities for end-to-end navigation both in a comprehensive analysis of the company's work and in working with certain aspects of its activities: for example, on managing investment projects, production and technological block, achieving strategic goals, etc.

At the beginning of October 2020, the top management of Russian Railways actively uses the system as part of its daily work for operational and selector meetings. In the near future, it is planned to expand the number of processed indicators to 400 thousand and up to 500 reporting forms, and increase the number of SKIM users to a thousand.

The system is\a platform for working with data: it solves the tasks of primary processing and storage of data, their transformation and cleaning, formation of analytical reporting forms, data management, data quality management, etc. Every day, the solution collects a large number of heterogeneous reporting indicators, verifies them, constantly checks the correctness of the methodology and provides them in the form of dashboards and reporting forms on computers, tablets and video walls of various formats - all this, taking into account a special approach to building user experience and developing system interfaces, - comments Andrey Baibutov, Development Director of the Analytical Solutions Department of KORUS Consulting Group.

One of the key changes is a tangible decrease in the impact of the human factor on the preparation of the necessary reporting and analytical materials. This provides us with a unified approach to the formation of operational management reporting, reducing the complexity of data preparation and increasing the speed of their presentation. Since the start of the project, the share of data on manually collected indicators has decreased from 20% to 0.4% of the total number of processed indicators, - emphasizes Irina Dolzhenko, project manager of SKIM, chief expert of the informatization department of Russian Railways. - The transfer of CIM to import-substituted technologies allows us to continue to use all the functionality of the analytical system in full compliance with the requirements of the regulator.

The development of SKIM not only made it possible to solve the problem of operational monitoring of the activities of Russian Railways, but also created a competence center for collecting and analyzing company data. Expertise of the center's employees makes it possible to accumulate information from many sources in a single format and thus make SKIM a convenient tool for both top management and managers of all levels, "says Tatyana Rakitina, Director of the Department for Innovative Projects of the CRC.