How Trenord has managed the issue of proforma invoices and receipts

Opening of new channels, customers’ high standards expectations, and processes rationalization helped Trenord identify opportunities of improvement aligned with its digital transformation path.

The challenge was to boost the service of issuing tax receipts and of proforma invoices by delegating the functionality to a tool entitled to sending the documents and offering users a reliable, stable, and fast service.

Industry: Mobility & Transportation

Who is Trenord?

Trenord is the first railway service in Lombardia, the most “moving” region in our country, where everyday over 820 thousand people are taking the train.
It manages the railway service in the hinterland of Milan, the regional railway service, the Malpensa Express train service for the airport, and the cross-border routes Como-Chiasso and Malpensa-Bellinzona.

The Goal

Transformation of Trenord from a railway company to a new digital platform for mobility

The mission of Mia-Platform is to focus on the creation of a Unique Digital Platform of Trenord, capable of aggregating all the data about planned and real-time routes and exhibit them towards users of the official Trenord App. In this way, the App becomes the focal point of every traveler that uses the mobility service, integrating into a single tool all the features used daily.

Analysis and Design

After analyzing the existing infrastructure, the team redesigned and implemented an event-based architecture, which uses Kafka data streams and orchestrates different microservices to generate the documents.

The team designed microservices with diverse specific responsibilities among which, for example, some microservices are in charge of creating PDF files and others send the email to the user. PDFs are automatically saved on the Cloud and available on the digital touchpoints in the user’s reserved area via APIs.

The prevent the system from crashing, we introduced the following solutions:

If an error is reported, the system manages the problem by moving the event within retry queues and DLQ (Dead Letter Queue). By doing this, the system avoids the automatic retry that can be overloaded when there are too many problems to handle.
By using Prometheus and Grafana, dashboards and alarms were created to notify service or sending issues in real-time.

Improved User Experience

An initial release of a single category of products allowed to test and improve the system, granting stability and performance for future implementations.

We incrementally introduced new product types, such as carnet tickets and passes. In the end, we added the proforma invoice service which is integrated with the electronic invoice sending service.

In less than a month, Trenord saw the new service 100% operational for its customers. The fast development, testing, and release made it possible to achieve the goal and ensure a stable user experience while maintaining high performance thanks to the systems offloading via DLQ.

“Mia-Platform provided know-how and a technological platform that allowed us to make huge progress. Day by day, we create new digital services for our customers and we never stop innovating. In fact, every year we release new functionalities”

Massimo Pasquini
Head of Digital Communication & Social Network @ Trenord