Railway maintenance & field operations
Plan rail maintenance around the constraints of a live network.
Coordinate qualified technicians, execution windows, dependencies and travel directly from SAP — from dispatcher planning to mobile completion.
Maintenance has to fit around train operations and the work windows that are actually available.
The technician assigned has to be qualified for the activity — feasibility comes before route efficiency.
Operations can depend on preceding work or require several technicians to be available at the same time, sometimes even in different locations.
Rail assets frequently sit away from conventional road addresses and need rail-specific location and travel logic.
A major European rail operator uses e-switch to connect SAP S/4HANA with Timefold-based optimization. Orders, technicians, qualifications, working times and planning constraints are transformed into an optimization model, solved, and returned to the existing SAP-centered planning process.
Responsible for a nationwide rail network carrying both passenger and freight traffic, the operator maintains a diverse infrastructure portfolio spanning track, signaling, electrification, stations and trackside assets.
Planning and mobile execution were already digital. But deciding which technician should perform which operation, and in which sequence, still depended heavily on dispatcher experience.
e-switch reads orders, operations, technicians, shifts, qualifications and planning constraints directly from SAP. These structures are translated into Timefold's routing model, optimized on-premise and written back into SAP as an optimized schedule.
SAP remains the system of record — without introducing a separate operational planning database.
Instead of manually constructing thousands of individual assignments, dispatchers start with an optimized schedule. Their attention shifts to exceptions, operational coordination and the situations where human judgment adds the most value.
SAP remains the operational system of record. Planning and optimization use existing master and transactional data, and results flow back into the same operational process.
Generative AI support for dispatchers and technicians across planning, service and maintenance processes.
Explore e-assistPlanning, optimization and field execution remain part of one SAP-based process — without introducing a separate operational data repository.
Turn inspections, checklists and field findings into structured, traceable data connected directly to SAP.
