Connected planning for a national rail-freight operator

The Customer

A national rail-freight operator whose planning processes spanned timetables, diagrams, rosters, crew skills and vacancies.

The Challenge

Critical planning processes ran across specialist source systems, spreadsheets, email and inherited Foundry applications. Timetable changes, diagramming, rosters and crew vacancies were closely related operationally but difficult to reconcile digitally. Slow validation cycles and inconsistent source data added noise, while previous unsuccessful technology programmes had created understandable scepticism among users.

What Quant8 Did

Quant8 embedded engineers with planners, rostering specialists, control teams and technology colleagues, developing a connected operational capability across three workstreams rather than one application.

Vacancy management:

A weekly and daily view of covered, vacant, uncovered, duplicate and at-risk turns
Cover suggestions informed by route knowledge, availability, depot and surrounding shifts
Workflows for assigning cover, recording additional hours, comments and operational status
Automated updates, vacancy communications and governed synchronisation with the crew-planning source system

Base-roster planning:

Depot and sub-depot roster creation with diagram and crew assignment
Configurable validation against working rules and contract conditions
Automated first-draft placement designed to minimise rule breaches
Review, comments, approval and export workflows, with warnings linked to the affected roster rows

Train planning and grids:

Reconciliation of thousands of services across operational timetable sources
An ontology connecting services, flows, diagrams, locations and timetable versions
Flow-building tools, validation against terminal activities, timings, routes and diagram coverage
Version comparison, change acknowledgement and audit history

How It Was Delivered

The programme used staged adoption rather than a single handover: internal functional testing, subject-matter-expert testing, broader team testing, formal sign-off, training material, go-live and hypercare. Control-room users were trained during rollout, with further location-based training planned, and user feedback was incorporated directly into working software, including changes made during live sessions.

The Result

The vacancy product completed production rollout and hypercare. The base-roster product had passed almost all test items and was moving towards production sign-off. The connected planning work had progressed from disconnected manual grids to a working flow builder and governed data foundation, with broader user demonstrations underway.

What Came Next

The engagement also identified a material optimisation opportunity in an inherited pipeline: removing unnecessary processing and data round-tripping is projected to reduce a slow one-to-two-hour validation cycle to minutes and create significant compute headroom. This remains an identified, projected benefit rather than a realised saving.