Employee resistance created a parallel system. Currently the profiles of 51,000 crew-members have been entered into the CMS database and over 15,000 actively access it everyday.It helps that the CMS is a browser-based, user-friendly, 24/7 application that is run on the railways' internal WAN. The thin clients and kiosks used by crew-members are linked to a central location, where edge servers have been installed for load balancing. Using thin clients not only lowered the project's cost but were also the right choice because of their longer lifespan (they do not have moving parts). And the centralized architecture simplifies software updates, for example. "If anything goes wrong, it can be corrected from the central command center," points out Ganju. Since Indian Railways trusts Open Source, yet another challenge was to create user-friendly thin-clients that ran on Linux. "We overcame this problem by training end users," says Ganju.

Creating the software and managing the project in-house was a huge task. The team had an 18-month deadline to launch in December of 2007 and with the amount of work that needed to be done on different fronts, the project team grew from three to 35. "The essence of our success was proper planning and timely contribution by each team. It is teamwork which made the most difference," says Ganju.

Their teamwork paid off. Today, the CMS provides global tracking of the railway's crew in real time, immaterial of whether they are on a train, resting at HQ, resting outstation, on leave or in training. "With the CMS there is a ready account of available crew," says Das. Armed with that data, supervisors can plan and allocate crew-members for trains.

And, if the number of crewmen available for the day falls below a critical level, a message is sent to authorities to do the needful.

Profit Express