The Go-Ahead Group, one of the UK’s largest transport companies, is partnering with Microsoft and Power BI to unify its data to improve the passenger experience.

The group operates bus and rail services across the UK, Norway, Germany, Singapore and Ireland. The partnership will see it use Azure’s Data Factory, Data Lake and Databricks to store and analyse data from across its operations.

By using Power BI to visualise anonymised data from the two million passenger journeys made on its buses every day, Go-Ahead management teams can gain insights such as passenger demand for services, journeys and estimated time until the next bus arrives at a particular stop.

The data gathered enables Go-Ahead to identify if bus stops are rarely used, so they can change the bus route to serve areas that are busier.

Kanwar Brar, interim group IT Director at Go-Ahead, said: “We wanted to be able to see which parts of our network are busy in real-time, and Azure enables us to do that - we have been able to implement Azure, Office 365 and Power BI quickly and they fit really well together.

“As we have broken down data silos at Go-Ahead, we have been able to grow our use of technology without a huge effort and at a lower cost - Azure is much cheaper than our on-premise data storage solution was.”

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