About our customer

SNCF Connect & Tech, a private subsidiary of SNCF Voyageurs (the French National Railway Company for passenger transport), is a leader in French e-commerce that implements customer digital solutions in the mobility sector. Relying on the expertise of over 1,200 employees based in Lille, Nantes, and Paris, the company supports the SNCF group in its digitization projects.

Key facts & figures – SNCF GROUP:

€41.4 billion in revenue in 2021

270,000 employees in France and around the world

Presence in 120 countries

15 million passengers transported every day

SNCF Connect & Tech’s goal is to make sustainable mobility accessible to all through innovation. To achieve this, SNCF Connect allows its customers to organize their trips throughout France and Europe by providing them with four main services: trip planning; purchasing and exchanging train tickets; finding the best door-to-door route; accessing real-time traffic information and alerts; and buying and renewing regional cards or subscriptions.
 

Following a data program completed in 2021, which laid the foundations for effective data use within the group, SNCF Connect decided in 2022 to launch a new program to support its three main goals for 2025:

1️⃣   Become the leading platform for sustainable mobility;

2️⃣   Consolidate its digital expertise for SNCF;

3️⃣   Unlock the potential of all its informational assets.

Challenge

 
In order to achieve these ambitious objectives, SNCF Connect must activate the essential levers to unlock the value of its data landscape:

The deployment of Performance & data for business: so that the business units can understand who the customers are and anticipate their expectations in order to effectively address them.

Enriching customer knowledge & data legacy: imagining and creating new functionalities to cover more and more modes of transportation. All these projects contribute to the enrichment of the legacy and understanding of data assets within the organization.

Cultivating team awareness of performance & business: good data utilization inevitably requires a sound understanding of the data and its strategic value.

 
However, up until now, the company’s data heritage was available but scattered, for example, within Excel files, Wiki pages, etc. It became essential to centralize everything to:

(+)   Gain efficiency around all data-related information;

(+)   Ensure a centralized view of the data heritage;

(+)   Hold all stakeholders accountable throughout the data chain;

(+)   Organize knowledge and facilitate information retrieval. 

The implementation of a data catalog was naturally one of the key solutions identified to address these challenges.

© 2023 SNCF Connect x Zeenea – Big Data & AI Paris – All Rights Reserved

Solution

SNCF Connect turned to the implementation of a data catalog – with a strong business orientation – that prioritizes the identification and documentation of strategic KPIs and dimensions, available dashboards, company glossary, and the listing of Data IT tools.

This approach allowed the company to start the data acculturation with information that is meaningful and brings value to the majority. The goal was to be able to answer the recurring questions of the operational teams before moving on to technical documentation (tables/fields).

That’s why SNCF Connect chose the Zeenea data discovery platform – and more specifically its data catalog:

© 2023 SNCF Connect x Zeenea – Big Data & AI Paris – All Rights Reserved

Next Steps

Transition from business-specific information to technical information,

Utilize the catalog to identify personal and confidential data, thus increasing security.