Manugistics - Rail Revenue and Pricing Solutions

Manugistics is the acknowledged leader in revenue management and pricing solutions for the passenger rail industry.

For more than 20 years, Manugistics has helped the world's leading passenger travel companies achieve improved profits through superior demand and revenue management solutions.

Our rail revenue management solutions help leading train operators such as Great North Eastern Railways (GNER), Eurostar and Midland Mainline forecast passenger journey demand for all their train services in order to set the optimal quota of seats available, at the optimal fare, at the right time.

Manugistics' solutions deliver added value to our customers, providing rapid return on investment and improving the bottom line. For example, our revenue management solutions can generate between 2.5% and 7.5% revenue improvement year on year

RAIL REVENUE MANAGEMENT

With railways competing directly with airlines on key routes, passengers now expect the prices offered by rail operators to compare favourably with airline competitors. Rail revenue management needs to manage complex origin and destination optimisation as well as generate optimal prices within regulatory guidelines with the objective of maximising overall profitability.

Similarly, optimal price changes need to be effected more rapidly and with a greater level of granularity to reflect the price sensitivity of micro-market segments. Manugistics' revenue management solution generates detailed demand forecasts for each origin and destination pair, recommends the optimal allocation of demand to capacity and appropriate inventory controls, and allows operators to frequently update their prices in reaction to market trends.

Manugistics' rail revenue management is designed to manage availability controls in rail reservation systems to help obtain the maximum revenue from expected future customer demand. In order to fulfil this role, the solution:

• Forecasts demand over all market segments
• Manages price and product availability to help maximise revenues and profits
• Allocates inventory to ensure availability for the most valuable customers while avoiding empty seats where sufficient demand exists
• Reacts to competitive changes in the marketplace
• Monitors performance and measures your success

PRICING AND PROMOTIONS PLANNING

Rail companies regularly run customer promotions, often investing considerable sums in advertising. However, it is difficult to understand which promotions are profitable and which are not. Revenues may be impacted by customers trading down to promotional offers from more expensive products, or promotions that are not correctly targeted.

Manugistics' promotions planning solution allows users to identify optimal promotional campaigns that maximise returns from promotional spend. Users can optimise promotions to analyse and maximise contribution, revenue or volume. Manugistics' pricing and promotions planning solution includes:

• Real-time, consumer-driven promotion simulation, optimisation and comparison
• Scenario analysis to evaluate various alternative promotional events
• Calculation of halo and cannibalisation effects of promotions on the sales of other products
• Embedded analytics that evaluate promotional effectiveness and forecast accuracy
• Understanding of the total demand impact of a promotion on your business

INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

Manugistics' inventory management solutions enable train operators to:

• Stimulate demand for surplus capacity by controlling their discounted products
• Simplify the labour-intensive task of setting train-level controls
• Track customer buying behaviour and current product availability
• Make bulk updates of controls through user-defined rules, based on business events such as remaining availability or seats sold by product
• Extract up-to-date sales data on selected services for further analysis and distribution

FUTURE TRENDS IN RAIL REVENUE MANAGEMENT AND PRICING

The rail industry is undergoing constant change, throwing up new challenges and developments, such as the rise of smart cards and ticketless travel. Manugistics continually invests in its solutions to take advantage of the revenue opportunities that these changes present, leveraging best practises from other industries such as airlines, cargo, tour operators and hotels to benefit rail operators.