Driving digital transformation at Australia's largest rail freight business

Who is the client?

Pacific National is Australia’s largest private rail freight company. Their services span the length and breadth of Australia, connecting terminals, paddocks and pits to ports efficiently moving essential goods and commodities for our customers.

What was their business challenge?

Pacific National needed to pivot from basic coal freight haulage, to become a modern intermodal integrator of multi-mode transport options. With the help of Digizoo the company is transforming into a sophisticated and modern business of the future that can meet emerging ESG obligations.

What did we deliver?

Digizoo has been engaged with Pacific National since 2015. Our staff are valued as highly trustworthy and dependable allies and are embedded throughout the IT and operational teams.

During that time, Digizoo has been engaged in multiple digital transformation initiatives

Digital Solutions team creation

Digizoo establishing and seeded a new Digital Solutions team based on Design Thinking principles to engage with all aspects of the business. This hybrid team is charged with transforming existing processes and experiences and develop new digital front ends and mobile applications for a large distributed blue-collar workforce. This was a foundational element to bringing together both executive management and a wary unionised workforce to work together to make the necessary strategic change.

Train Management System (TMS) modernisation

Digizoo’s staff have led the modernisation of the core Train Management System (TMS) by established modern ways of working to enable the existing team to improve productivity and deliver better solution, all whilst improving developer engagement and morale.

This included the establishment of more modern Azure cloud based automated platforms for integration, as well as developing APIs and orchestration to enable new digital applications to be built in order to transform the business.

B2B Refresh Project

Digizoo’s staff have formed part of the internal team that designed an architecture for the new B2B Customer Experience solutions to allow the client to go to RFP. Together, Digizoo and PN resources form one team to ensure quality of offshore delivery of the solution.

Digizoo’s experts are there to plug gaps in technology build where the “cheap and sometimes cheerful” offshore systems integrators deem those components to be outside of the agreed commercial arrangements.

Rail Cube

Rail Cube is a new rostering solution based on a SaaS application from Europe. Digizoo drove the solution design, product selection, technical and business integration and change management to deliver in a very challenging industrial relations environment that was resistant to change.

What were the business outcomes?

The technology foundations of foundational change have now been developed and proven, and the scaling process is well underway to allow the necessary change to occur at the speed necessary to meet the needs of the environmental changes of the industry.

Digizoo has now moved from a role of design and build to that of a trusted advisor. In this advisory role, Digizoo’s staff are overseeing others as they implementation new technologies and applications into the new platform.