SOFSE
            

Argentina’s leading rail operator, the Sociedad Operadora Ferroviaria Sociedad del Estado (SOFSE) was founded in 2008. Born out of a national railway restructuring, SOFSE operates five main passenger rail lines and numerous cargo and commuter rail services. Its over 20,000 employees are responsible for $72.40 million in revenue and transport 350 million passengers a year.

The Sociedad Operadora Ferroviaria Sociedad del Estado (SOFSE) manages five major Argentinian railway lines and transports nearly a million passengers a day. Established in 2008, it faced a monumental challenge: merge five major rail lines with diverse technologies, infrastructure, cultures, and regulations. And if that wasn’t enough, they were also pursuing an ambitious vision of intermodal transport: a unified, contactless form of payment, the SUBE card, useable for all transit options in Argentina.

“Different processes for each branch, different types of railway technology, different union agreements, stemming from so many years of decentralized operation, made it almost impossible to achieve the streamlined, centralized process governance we envisioned. We needed not only strong leadership to generate change, but also robust technological solutions.” Ariel Cherti, System and Process Manager, SOFSE.

First step: SAP integration

SOFSE needed a way to visualize and govern their railway system’s complex management, streamline documentation, and map customer journeys. And with their core financial processes all running on SAP, the tool they chose needed to be compatible.

Working together with Edison Tecnologias de Aprendizaje y Mejora S.A., they rolled out Software AG’s ARIS Enterprise, which checked all the boxes.

“To achieve our vision of an interconnected passenger transport system with maximum safety, quality, efficiency, and innovation, we needed a smarter way to visualize and simplify our processes. Edison helped our team get the most out of ARIS’s capabilities. And they also made sure that we could easily integrate with SAP Solution Manager and SAP Enable Now, which was a big priority.” said Ariel.

Once ARIS was rolled out, the team was able to design, document and optimize their business processes using accessible dashboards and charts. With the SAP Enable Now integration, they’ve even been able to get their employees involved in the process.

SOFSE’s new process vision has allowed strategic teams to align the diverse railways and get them speaking the same language. This single source of truth has been revolutionary. SOFSE now has 600 active ARIS users, 50 applications, 1200 transactions, 350 job roles in the system and can instantly visualize and manage their intricate process workflows.

And it’s paying off. With administrative and finance processes standardized, accounting reports take a month instead of a year to generate. Process governance has brought improved management control and opened the door for onboarding new processes. And most importantly, riders can tell the difference with better train maintenance and improved service offerings.

A single payment solution for transit in Argentina

But they weren’t done yet: SOFSE has used business process transformation as a springboard for change, and now it was ready to take on the next big project.

“One of our great challenges was implementing the SUBE card as the single payment system for all lines and then integrating it with the entire urban multimodal transport system including buses and trains.” Ariel Cherti, System and Process Manager, SOFSE.

And it’s been a great success. Currently, with the SUBE card riders can use this one form of contactless cashless payment across transit lines like buses and rail in the biggest cities, and, increasingly, country-wide rail lines. Now their vision—a truly intermodal transit network for Argentina —is becoming reality.