Case study

Supporting West Yorkshire’s journey to franchising

How Snapper's Mosaiq Insights is helping one of the UK’s largest public transport authorities move to a franchised model.

3 min read

April 29, 2024

West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA) is one of the largest public transport authorities in the UK and is on its way to becoming a franchised network by 2027. Buses are the most widely used form of public transport in West Yorkshire, with over 1.7 million passenger journeys taken each week.

The challenge

In early 2024, the Combined Authority announced its decision to roll out a franchised system in the region.

Under franchising, WYCA will bring its 1500+ vehicle network into a centrally managed system. Moving to franchising is a challenging undertaking, requiring transparency and strong collaboration between WYCA, operators in the network, and service providers.

“We need to be able to see what’s going on day in and day out, report on that data, and make decisions with it,” says Graham Davies, WYCA’s Travel System Manager. “It’s critical that we get a broad, detailed view of on-time performance across all our operators and the entire network.”

“As we move to a franchised model, we need to be able to sit around the table with operators and say ‘this is where things are going well, and where things aren’t going so well’, we need to focus on the insights that make the service better.”

How Mosaiq Insights Helps

Mosaiq Insights is giving WYCA the insights needed to build a reliable, punctual public transport system in a franchised model. Actionable insights and accessible data will be key drivers of the transparency and accountability that characterise franchised networks.

The Snapper Services team collaborated with Vix Technology to connect WYCA’s data feeds to Mosaiq Insights. This allowed for a smooth onboarding process without disrupting WYCA’s existing workflows and infrastructure.

“Mosaiq Insights has been able to deliver our network data in a whole new way. It’s quick to load, intuitive, and most importantly, the team likes to use it. It will be an essential part of our toolkit as we move forward into a franchised future.”

Snapper Services is working closely with WYCA to grow Mosaiq Insight’s contract management capabilities for public transit authorities. First, WYCA will be able to invite operators to access their own performance data in Mosaiq Insights. With operators securely working out of the same tool as the combined authority, everyone has equal access to performance information, reducing friction.

Results

While the transition to franchising will take some time, the data WYCA uses today is essential to delivering an efficient and effective service now and in the future.

By reducing time to insight, Mosaiq Insights is enabling WYCA’s analysts to get to the heart of issues and tackle reporting faster than before. This means WYCA can dig deeper into opportunities to improve the passenger experience, delivering on its ambition to build a connected region and growing patronage.

“The Snapper Services team is a great partner to us at WYCA. The close collaboration in the relationship means we can really contribute to the direction of the product. Snapper deeply understands our needs and challenges as a local transport authority and will be a great support on our journey to franchising.”

The technical side: building and deploying on AWS

AWS Architecture

Mosaiq Insights’ architecture was guided by the pillars of the AWS Well Architected Framework, and the SaaS lens.

The Infrastructure is orchestrated and managed using cloud formation, and the CI/CD pipeline relies on an automated process. This also brings other benefits, such as being able to stand up instances close to the customer within a short time window.

User management leverages AWS Cognito, to ensure the product caters to the customers’ needs for authentication and authorisation.

The Compute layer leverages ECS and Lambdas to provide fast performance scaling when the need arises.

At Data level, Mosaiq Insights employs a variety of technologies and persistence strategies. Dynamo DB, RDS, S3 all play various parts in the pipeline, while Kinesis and Glue facilitate data transfers.

The application is made available to end users by CloudFront so that it’s as readily available as possible. The interfacing with the business layers is achieved via AWS API Gateway.

Snapper Services employee access is restricted using AWS IAM to ensure only authorised users and tools can access the solution. Passively, behind the scenes, automated security tools analyse the CloudTrail logs and the stored data for another level or safety and security.

CloudWatch is used by our SRE and product teams to monitor all of the AWS infrastructure that supports Mosaiq Insights. Critical alarms are integrated with AWS’ Incident and Detection Response team, which provides immediate hands-on support from AWS engineers, in the event of a high-severity issue.

TCO Analysis

As an existing SaaS product, no TCO Analysis was undertaken to deploy Mosaiq Insights into WYCA’s system. WYCA has subscribed to a set monthly fee calculated by the number of vehicles in their system. In addition to access to data in the Mosaiq Insights solution, WYCA has the ability to influence the direction of Mosaiq Insights through feedback and UX research.

Since Mosaiq Insights is developed and deployed on the AWS cloud, WYCA does not need to look after internal infrastructure, enjoys unlimited user seats, and pay no additional project or development fees for the platform’s continuous improvement.

What we learned

Data volumes can vary tremendously from one SaaS customer to the next. Having an architecture that can scale easily is paramount.
In the context of evolving contract management and franchising around the world, being able to manage data access in smart ways can reduce waste, cost, and increase the speed to being able to access data for public transit authorities and operators.
Automating not just the application itself but also the DevOps monitoring stack from the beginning saves time and increases trust from an operational perspective.
There is no one-size-fits-all at any tech stack level. Always seek the right tool for the job. Not everything needs to be a container, and not everything can be reduced to a few lambdas. Same for persistence: always start with the customer need.
With an organisation of this size and complexity, it was important to engage with the end customer early to encourage collaboration and open comms channels.