Our long-time clients Southeastern Rail had significant analytics challenges. Petabytes of complex rail asset and planning data from the Department for Transport were being cleaned and unified each day by a powerful data engine we developed – but our clients did not have a centralised platform to view and leverage these insights. This meant Southeastern’s data team needed to repeatedly download and manually analyse data on powerful computers to create reports. Insights were out-of-date when they reached stakeholders, and report style was visually inconsistent. Decision makers could not effectively monetise data, or address pain points quickly enough to meet traveller demands. A one-stop platform for key insights was needed, able to sleekly present real-time insights for multiple departments and help data teams access extracts for one-off analysis
Our first priority was to fully understand the reporting requirements of each team. We undertook an impact analysis to map these insight needs, then examined technology options from our BI toolkit. We designed two powerful insight systems and presented these to the client, who opted for a bespoke solution leveraging React. Custom Python FastAPIs were established to deliver gigabytes of data from our ultra-efficient data powerhouse backend each day. Sleek, tailored dashboards powered by React presented this data to stakeholders using clear, targeted visualisations. A user-friendly navigation and filtering system was then implemented, letting decision makers and data teams access the views they needed without SQL. This was all wrapped in an ultra-secure, credentialed Azure webapp. Stakeholders could now access their data 24/7 from anywhere with an internet connection, giving unparalleled flexibility and resilience. The final element was a superfast extract download system for a range of file extensions, helping data teams work on the move
