IVU.rail for the Finnish state railway VR Group

On a rail network of 5,660 km, state-owned VR Group conveys around 15 million passengers every year between the capital Helsinki in the south and Kolari in the far north. The company has been planning and dispatching the train schedules in regional transport as well as all parking and track occupancy at Helsinki Central Station with IVU.rail since back in 2010. In view of growing demands on efficiency and planning quality, VR Group decided to use the IVU software also to replace the system for planning and dispatch of its conductors in regional train services and train drivers throughout the Group.

“We could no longer map the complex crewing model sufficiently with our previous system,” says Harri Takala, Head of Planning, Regional Services at VR Group. “It was very complex to establish efficient duties, so we looked around for a suitable solution. The wide functional scope and the flexibility of IVU.rail were the best fit for our requirements. We have therefore gained a future-oriented solution with which we are exceptionally well-equipped for future challenges.”

“Having our vehicles, conductors and train drivers in one integrated system opens up numerous opportunities for us to further develop our disruption management, resource optimisation and data-driven operations. The cooperation with IVU gives us a very good solution for the future”, says Antti Peura, Head of Digital, Regional Services at VR Group. 

IVU.rail has powerful optimisation cores that calculate the best possible duty schedule automatically on the basis of freely configurable rules. Using the integrated variant planning, VR Group determined personnel requirements for the won tender in 2020 for the Helsinki urban railway network. In daily dispatching, IVU.rail facilitates rule-compliant personnel deployment with automatic deployment suggestions. Finally, the mobile employee portal IVU.pad.employee, which employees can use to receive notifications and view their duties and work time accounts, ensures a fully digital workflow.

“As a long-standing partner of VR Group, we are very familiar with our customer’s high expectations,” says Christian Teschner, Sales Director Rail at IVU Traffic Technologies. “So we are delighted that we are now able to use IVU.rail to help VR Group to put their personnel deployment on a stable footing for further enhancements.”