Streamlining Thinkproject CDE Enterprise Project Creation for Deutsche Bahn InfraGO

About Deutsche Bahn InfraGO

Geschäftsbereich Personenbahnhöfe
(formerly DB Station&Service AG)

From the company's profile page:

DB InfraGO AG is shaping the future of German rail infrastructure. We have been pooling the resources of DB Netz AG and DB Station&Service AG in a public service infrastructure company since 1 January 2024. With over 61,000 employees*, we are working to establish the foundation of today's and tomorrow's mobility.

About Thinkproject

From the company's vision page:

Our vision for the built asset industry is to enable a safe, sustainable, and collaborative environment. We empower our customers with the necessary tools to transform this vision into reality.

Automating Configuration Management

The Thinkproject CDE Enterprise SaaS application has adeptly facilitated project space creation for Deutsche Bahn InfraGO (DB InfraGO), skillfully handling the complexities and specificities of each project for a long time. While this method has been effective, particularly for projects with distinct characteristics tied to regional and construction types, the challenge arises when scaling to create more and more projects in a short period of time. The //bench Cloud Automation Framework introduced a solution that retains the inherent strengths of Thinkproject CDE Enterprise while significantly enhancing productivity for large-scale project creation through automation, turning a complex and time consuming manual process into a streamlined, automated workflow.

Overcoming Challenges

Before automation, the challenging task lay in now manually creating hundreds of projects annually. Transitioning from this manual process to automated project creation required meticulous analysis and documentation of each procedural step and their dependencies. Collaborating closely with the customer, we ensured that every action could be automated via the Thinkproject CDE Enterprise REST API, supplementing missing functionalities as needed. Through an agile approach of specification, implementation, and review, we rapidly iterated towards our goal.

Implementation and Innovation

Our aim was to drastically reduce the manual effort involved in project setup. Now, administrators simply choose a project name and click ‘Create’. The automation intelligently fetches all necessary contextual information from TP CDE's project management documents, including configurations uploaded by administrators via Excel/CSV, facilitating seamless project setup.

Achievements and Impact

Within three months, we moved from concept to production, cutting manual project creation time from 1-2 hours automated down to 30-45 minutes. Around 200-300 REST API requests are managed per project creation. The ability of //bench to execute multiple jobs concurrently means up to 10 projects can now be created simultaneously, saving 90% and days of manual configuration work. Since its launch in early 2023, this automation has successfully generated over a thousand Thinkproject CDE Enterprise projects for DB InfraGO within a year, demonstrating substantial time and cost savings.

Customer Testimonial

“//bench has dramatically lowered execution costs and saved us countless hours of manual effort, proving to be an invaluable asset in our TP CDE project space creation management.” said S.W., Head of Standardization and Digitalization DB InfraGO (Geschäftsbereich Personenbahnhöfe).

Future Directions

There's potential to further enhance the efficiency of this automation use-case by parallelizing certain configuration actions, reducing project creation times even more. We're also exploring a fully automated, lights-out process, where //bench would autonomously initiate new projects based on periodic checks of Thinkproject CDE Enterprise management documents.