Your Comms Group Case Studies.

Transmach:  

A little bit about Transmach

TransMach is one of the UK’s leading specialist suppliers of ticketing solutions to the transport industry. Working across all types of transport and transport services – from buses to trams to parking enforcement – TransMach’s core business is rooted in the Internet of Things.

The Internet of Things relates to physical products that are embedded with software and processing ability that is delivered over a network and as with everything related to the

Internet of Things, connectivity is king. Bar a small number of clients in Europe, TransMach’s business is UK based, but they operate in a sector that is dizzyingly agile, where change happens rapidly and demand is urgent. Which means TransMach needs to have solutions that are deployable at speed.

It’s that agility, along with an innovative approach to products and service delivery that have seen TransMach build an enviable reputation for reliable and technologically advanced ticketing solutions. And because they offer end-to-end service, it’s not always just about the supply of the right equipment and accessories for mobile ticketing or ticket collection – TransMach also have a long established pedigree in providing the back end systems that enable their clients to migrate easily to a fully mobile and online ticketing system.

Whilst there are many transport providers that only sell tickets at point of travel – a local public bus service being a good example – there are other providers who want to sell their tickets in advance, for example a coach tour company or train business.

Both approaches require different solutions. In the first, a mobile ticket machine can take payment and generate a ticket for travel on the spot.

In the second example, the travel or transport provider may not always need a point of sale solution, but will instead require an online booking agent system – to take payment and manage capacity – and a mobile ticket validation solution at point of departure.

And, of course, there are those customers who will want a unique-to-them hybrid of both approaches.

TransMach’s expertise and experience in this fast-moving world has been one of the reasons for their rapid growth. They currently work with 300+ transport providers around the country and in Ireland, all of different sizes and types, all of whom want slightly different ticketing solutions.

The YCG Solution

When they bumped into us at Earl’s Court and explained that they were having a problem with the rising cost of the smart sims that underpinned the majority of their mobile ticketing solutions we understood that what they needed was a customised approach to the problem.

TransMach operates in a world where GDPR and cyber security is absolutely essential, so they have a highly robust and ultra-secure in-house encryption service that processes all the data they, their customers and their customers’ customers generate.

What they didn’t need, therefore, was the expensive machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions with built-in secure data processing features that other comms suppliers were offering.

Nor did they need a sim solution that fixed them to one particular network provider – and which would potentially give them and their customers a major headache in areas where that network wasn’t reliable.

What they needed instead was a better and more reliable way of transferring the large amount of data more cheaply.

And without giving away all the details of how we did that – magicians always need to keep some of how they do what they do a secret – TransMach ended up with a solution that they say has been exceptionally successful – and has saved them a fair amount of their original cost.

We now supply more than 1,000 sims to TransMach all of which have fixed IPs to allow full control and sim visibility at device level.

It was a chance encounter that has enabled TransMach to improve cost and efficiency, and allowed us to demonstrate one of our core values – innovation.

What came next?

Sometimes in business, you’re faced with a problem that, on the surface at least, appears to have no solution.

Then you go to a trade exhibition at London’s Earl’s Court, and you get talking to someone who happens to be in the right line of business, and it turns out they have a very creative solution to your problem.

And that’s not all. Not only does this creative solution make it possible for you to deliver your service in the way you want to, it also saves you around 40 per cent on what you were paying before.