Sunday, February 16, 2025

How SNCF Connect & Tech is reinventing mobility thanks to its expert teams in digital innovation

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With more than 20 years’ experience in the mobility sector, SNCF Connect & Tech brings together a community of 1,200 employees who create and deploy digital solutions to serve SNCF Group users, customers and agents.

The raison d’être of SNCF Connect & Tech is simple: to innovate to make sustainable mobility accessible to all. This is what motivates the community of Digital Mobility Changers and this is what allows the company to be part of the SNCF Group’s strategy, which consists of doubling the modal share of the train by 2030. .

More than two-thirds of the workforce dedicated to tech projects

A private subsidiary of SNCF Voyageurs, SNCF Connect & Tech has more than 900 tech experts at the service of this sustainable mobility. Its technology teams are divided by strategic areas of development: back-end (25%); Ops, cloud and security (20%); mobile (15%); website (10%); data & AI (10%), testing (10%) and full stack (10%). Their role ? Design, test, deploy and operate in production digital products and services to improve mobility.

“  Our products and services are technologically advanced and innovative. They offer industrial robustness (resilience, technical excellence, high availability, cybersecurity) in an agile organization  ,” explains Arnaud Monier, Technology Director of SNCF Connect & Tech. The objective: to innovate by developing products and services for travellers, but also a wide range of solutions that will indirectly contribute to the quality of travel (driver application, ticket control application for SNCF agents, etc. ). For this, the teams work on:

  • the development of the front-end (SNCF Connect application, transilien.com, SNCF.com, thalys.com sites, etc.) and self-service terminals in stations,
  • the middleware with the offer access portal and the route engine,
  • back-end development.
sncf-connect-tech-whiteboard

These projects allow us to be present at each stage of the trip: before the trip with the development of sites and applications, technical bricks to access the different mobility offers, the best routes, the route for buying the ticket and of all digital services (management of subscriptions, commercial cards, customer account). In the station, with the software to ensure the proper functioning of the terminals, the generation of tickets, but also the tools to facilitate control and the fight against fraud. Finally, during the trip, with the management of traveler information flows, or the support of drivers, continues Arnaud Monier.

Focus on SNCF Connect, the digital service that allows you to manage your journey from the first to the last kilometer

SNCF Connect, designed and developed entirely by the SNCF Connect & Tech teams, is a digital service that is available through a website and an e-commerce application. It is the first French e-commerce site in the mobility sector. This service brings together on a single interface the planning of all short and long distance journeys, the purchase and exchange of train tickets, as well as after-sales service.

Our customers have the choice between several proposals to select the best urban route anywhere in France, from the first to the last kilometer, with the possibility of following traffic information and receiving alerts in real time. The purchase, the renewal of cards as well as regional subscriptions are also possible on this same interface, confirms an employee.

The results are there: the site and the application record more than 3 million daily visits on average. Since January 25, 2021, more than 125 million tickets have been sold, i.e. more than 510,000 tickets per day on average. Another figure that shows the importance of the application available on iOS and Android: the purchase of 64% of the tickets sold during last summer was made on the mobile channel (or via the responsive site).

During the opening of ticket sales for the end of year holidays, record peaks in connection and sales were recorded on the 1st day:

  • 1.3 million tickets sold on the first day, up 30% on last year,
  • On average, 30 tickets are purchased every second, ie the equivalent of 3 TGVs every minute.

Technical challenges met in agile mode

To carry out the various projects, SNCF Connect & Tech employees rely on agile methods, with an organization in Scrum or Kanban. DevSecOps is part of the entity’s DNA for project development. Since 2015, teams have been able to deploy and operate their services in production with the support of the SRE ( Site Reliability Engineer ) and the team dedicated to security. Another lever used: craftsmanship , which is an approach to software development based on the quality of the products designed, and which is complementary to agility. Quality and automation are everyone’s business to move towards Continuous Delivery , with currently one production launch per week on SNCF Connect.

sncf-connect-tech-brainstorming

Many technical challenges are therefore taken up every day by the tech teams of SNCF Connect & Tech. To develop the SNCF Connect application and the general public site, it was particularly necessary to combine the quality of the code and the business logic. As part of this large-scale project, employees have adopted the following technologies:

  • the Flutter language for cross-platform mobile development,
  • the React and Next.js frameworks for the web part,
  • a common back-for-front in Kotlin for logic,
  • machine learning to power universal and conversational research,
  • CI/CD ( Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery ) driven on the cloud entirely in Infra-as-Cod, with up to 300 environments (mobile, web and back) deployed automatically in parallel.

To develop chatbots and conversational AI without black box effect, and while keeping control of data models and hosting, our teams created Tock, an open source platform now shared with the community on GitHub. It is used by other companies and in the public sector, and it has been rewarded several times since 2016: Best Robot Experience, prize for the Free Software Actors competition, and that of the best open source strategy, adds a collaborator.

Many projects are being studied for 2023 with the same objective: to continuously improve the quality of the products and services offered.

SNCF Connect & Tech is recruiting around fifty profiles to strengthen its teams

Would you like to take part in the many projects developed by SNCF Connect & Tech, the Group entity dedicated to customer digital solutions to improve sustainable mobility? The company is still recruiting for 2022 on its 3 sites (Nantes, Lille and Paris) around fifty positions in its various areas of expertise: technologies, data, webmarketing, customer relations, user experience, business development, support functions.

sncf-connect-tech-equipes

A majority of IT positions are currently available: Java back-end developers, Flutter mobile developers, digital accessibility expert, DevOps production engineer, agile master, etc., as well as about fifteen internship offers.

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