From paper to app

Midttrafik

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<h1>From <span class="text-athletic-green">paper to app</span></h1>
<p><span class="text-athletic-green">Midttrafik</span></p>

Challenge

Sometimes, things aren’t as easy as they seem. The Danish traffic service organisation Midttrafik, that administrates the public transport in Central Jutland, has a very popular and well-functioning app for smartphone tickets and transit tickets. The challenge is that ‘Youth cards’ are not supported in the app due to a complex approval process that is handled manually at Midttrafik. Therefore, Midttrafik issues Youth cards as paper-based cards – an expensive and non-customer friendly solution.

Solution

We are developing a card-issuing system that connects the card-ordering website (www.mitungdomskort.dk) with the Midttrafik app. The new system features a business logic that automates the complex approval process and approves up to 90% of all Youth cards automatically. Strong integrations ensure that data is retrieved, processed, and forwarded from mitungdomskort.dk to the Midttrafik app. Today Midttrafik’s customers are easily issued with a Youth card on the app instead of a printed paper-based travel card. The results are happy customers, 25% less administration and reduced costs.

Easy and flexible management

Digitising the Youth card requires a large amount of business logic and strong integrations. Luckily, the hard work results in valuable improvements for Midttrafik.

  • Automatic approval

    The card-issuing system automatically approves up to 90% of all Youth cards. Approvals are based on business logic we're developing in close collaboration with Midttrafik. Some cards still require manual approval, but this process is also being improved, as it is easier for Midttrafik to view and revise data and to manually approve the card.

  • Improved customer service

    All actions performed by the CIS solution, customers and employees are logged and searchable. This is important because Midttrafik must be able to produce data on when different actions have taken place. Moreover, the customer overview in CIS displays the complete history for each customer allowing Midttrafik’s customer service to provide much faster assistance to customers telephoning or emailing. The overview also includes a link to mitungdomskort.dk – the website where Youth cards are ordered – that enables customer service to view both data sources simultaneously.

  • Efficient reporting

    CIS supports several types of reports, including reports for the National Agency for Education and Quality. Tailored reports are used for statistics and analysis, enabling better and more timely communication with customers.

Development

Automation, cloud and integrations are the keywords behind the development of the new card-issuing system (CIS). We're developing the CIS solution using a service-oriented architecture in Microsoft Azure. Having a scalable cloud-based system means that Midttrafik can scale up when lots of Youth cards are being ordered at the beginning of each academic year, while operating costs are minimised during periods of low activity.

Strong integrations are at the heart of the CIS solution, ensuring that the CIS system retrieves card data from the card-ordering website mitungdomskort.dk, and permits the card data to be processed before forwarding it to the Midttrafik app. The logic is designed as Azure functions, which deliver messages via a service bus. Events are logged in Cosmos DB, Azure Tables and Azure SQL. Relational data is stored in Azure SQL. The solution is monitored 24/7 with Application Insights, which alerts in cases of special events by email and MS Teams channels.

More than 30% of the customers already receive their Youth cards via the app, and Midttrafik expects this percentage to rise as more customers order/renew their Youth cards.

Midttrafik Desktop 990 600
Midttrafik Mobile 300 540

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