Graham Cooper, Director of Product and Marketing, writes about a memorable day of brainstorming, birthday cake and legendary locomotives.
In September 2024 we held our third RailSmart EDS user group. It’s a very special occasion in the calendar where we invite customers to come and share their thoughts about everything to do with competency management and how they use our solution to support their business.
Colleagues from right across the rail industry gathered together – freight and passenger operators, people from the supply chain and partner organisations. In fact, this year’s user group was the best attended so far, with double the number of customer organisations and triple the number of delegates compared with the previous year.
What better place to host such an event than the National Railway Museum in York? Home to so many railway legends – The Flying Scotsman, the Duchess of Hamilton and Mallard, the world’s fastest steam locomotive.
Needless to say, the balcony overlooking the museum’s great hall made for an exciting venue for us to chat about all things rail.
An event which moves with the times
It’s interesting to see how our user group has evolved over the three years since it started. The first event took more of a chalk and talk approach, where we addressed our customers, told them what the product could do, and showed them a road map of what was coming next.
Three years on, and the user group has become a much more interactive day.
Customers joined in panel discussions about different aspects of the solution, and workshops where attendees could ask questions about the best way to unlock insight from the data and use it for decision making.
With people coming from such a wide range of businesses, everyone has something different about RailSmart EDS to bring to the table.
Although customers are there to learn from us, in all honesty they learn just as much from the other railway businesses in the room. Some people told us the chats they were having made them realise they could actually be managing competency in a more efficient way having listened to others’ experiences.
We were learning too. Customers gave us some really useful insight into what they would like the solution to help them with in the future.
A new way to assess the assessors
One particular area of user group feedback is helping us to shape some enhanced functionality, in the area of verifications.
At the previous user group last year, customers told us they would like a better way to verify that their assessors are carrying out the assessments in the right way, and to make sure assessors are recognising competency and identifying skills gaps correctly.
There was general agreement that an improved verification function would add an extra layer of security to the assessment process.
So after last year’s session, we came up with some ideas about how we could develop verifications in RailSmart EDS, and we invited customers to share their own views at this year’s user group.
In one of the interactive panel sessions, EDS users told us that those in verifying roles needed a more complete and streamlined way to check the assessors were challenging those they were assessing, and making a range of balanced judgements. This feedback will help us make sure we’re going in the right direction with our software development, building in features that are aligned against user need and making a real difference in improving outcomes.
Conversations like this are like gold dust. They give us a valuable insight into the views of people in the industry which we might not otherwise have picked up.
Happy 10th birthday to RailSmart EDS
Meeting customers’ needs has been at the heart of our software development since the start – and for RailSmart EDS, the start was 10 years ago.
We couldn’t let the opportunity to celebrate the birthday of RailSmart EDS pass us by, so along with a delicious lunch, everyone enjoyed some birthday cake.
The lunch break gave us all a chance to catch up, and I took the opportunity to chat with one of our customers, an assessor from LNER, who reminded me that last year he had driven the train up to York himself!
As you can probably tell, I’m already looking forward to the next user group, and I’m excited to see how this type of forum will help customers of our other solutions.
Looking ahead
Next up will be our second user group for customers of our passenger information systems, including dynamic route maps, live departure boards and timetables.
The passenger information suite user group looks to be on the same trajectory as the RailSmart EDS user group with more customers joining each time, keen to learn from us and each other and to share best practice.
Meanwhile, if you would like to find out more about what happens at a user group, take a look at this video to see what our customers have to say about the day – and to catch a glimpse of some of those iconic railway vehicles in the background.
It’s the perfect reminder of what a remarkable industry we work in.
To find out more about RailSmart EDS, or book a demo.
