The Customer
DB Fernverkehr AG is a subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn AG and is responsible for the sales and ticketing of DB's passenger transport services, as well as for many other transport companies. It thus serves as the interface between the railway and approximately five and a half million passengers daily in Germany.
The company operates travel centers, an online ticketing system via the DB website and the DB Navigator apps (for Android and iOS), as well as a telephone customer service.
The “Vendo” Project
Deutsche Bahn transports more than eight million people daily in regional passenger transport across Europe, in addition to up to seven million transactions. Achieving this logistical feat with a historically evolved sales platform has been challenging. The different channels of this platform (e.g., Mobile Client, Web) have created silos that are not only costly but also failed to provide customers with consistent services and experiences.
The challenge is to rebuild Germany's most successful mobility platform using the latest technologies, thereby offering users a uniform and intuitive user experience throughout the customer journey. The strictly timed deadlines of the project posed a particular challenge.
To meet these challenges, DB Fernverkehr AG turned to itemis AG to recruit experienced external teams for the project. By choosing this approach, DB Fernverkehr AG, which had previously relied solely on individual contracts, took a new path to achieve its goals on time
Our Contribution to Success
To migrate the historically evolved sales platform with various channels to a modern microservice architecture, itemis supports and further develops the well-established DevOps approach with a strong focus on scalable operations in the cloud. Support in this project is provided by experienced, self-organized teams working in web frontend (frontend and middleware technologies). In the Vendo project, itemis successfully implemented the offer component in the form of search and display of travel information, near-time updates (travel companion), as well as the offer and sale of tickets and railcards using modern frontend technology like Vue.js, almost exclusively using TypeScript. In addition to software development following Scrum processes within a SAFe setup with multiple release cycles and more than ten agile teams, tasks also include test-driven software development and the design of build and deployment pipelines.
DB Fernverkehr AG achieves significant added value for the Vendo project through the integration of experienced and coordinated teams from itemis AG.
By using structured and autonomously working teams, the effort in sourcing and training is significantly reduced. Initially, some experienced business analysts, project managers, and a software architect worked in the project with DB, enabling the project teams to quickly leverage their strengths and create added value. Another advantage is the flexible scaling of the itemis AG project teams, which can adapt to the needs of DB Fernverkehr AG. In close collaboration with the departments and previously established development teams, the teams can leverage their strong qualities, respond to new challenges, and meet tight schedules.
Thanks to the support of itemis, a historically evolved sales platform with various channels can be migrated to a modern microservice architecture. The modernization results in a significant improvement in maintainability and interchangeability of the new sales platform. This leads to further benefits such as lower costs for servers, hardware, and infrastructure, as well as fewer technical dependencies.
Employee Benefits
The employees of itemis AG are driven by the high motivation that comes from supporting an environmentally friendly mode of transportation. Many developers are excited about the opportunity to make train travel easier for everyone.
However, the project also presents exciting challenges in terms of size and requirements. These include aspects such as scalability, the number of calls, and the volume of data that needs to be processed. These challenges offer employees the opportunity to further improve their skills and acquire new knowledge. The use of a mix of cutting-edge technologies in the project has further spurred our developers' enthusiasm.
