One of Australia’s largest tollways, EastLink, has successfully switched over to a new state-of-the-art tolling back office system and customer website, provided by Sice, the Spanish systems integration and technology company.
EastLink is the only tollway in Australia that exceeds one million toll point transactions per day on average. The 24-mile (39km) multi-lane free-flow electronic toll route is the major north-south transport artery in Melbourne’s east, connecting the Eastern, Monash, Frankston and Peninsula Link freeways. Since opening in 2008, EastLink’s traffic has increased from 135,000 to 250,000 vehicle trips per day. EastLink’s new tolling back office system is a tailored version of Sice’s Billing and Invoicing System (BIS).
Since going live, the new system has been successfully processing the tolls and payments for the 250,000 vehicle trips and 1.2 million fully electronic toll point transactions made on EastLink each day. The change-over to the new Sice system was completed over just one weekend. This was a remarkable achievement, including the migration of historical data for 560,000 customer accounts, 2.8 million casual user accounts, 3.4 million DSRC tolling tags, 18 million vehicles, and 32 million trips.
EastLink’s new Sice system provides the functionality of the previous system, including Australia-wide interoperability of tolling tags and tollways. However, the new Sice system also adds numerous functional improvements specified by EastLink to assist customer service officers and customers. The new system is also more efficient and operates with more real-time functionality compared to the previous system. Unlike EastLink’s previous customer website, the new site is fully adaptive to different device types, including mobile phones and tablets, as well as desktop computers. The joint EastLink-Sice implementation team has been working on the project since February 2015.
“EastLink’s new tolling back office system from Sice is not just more efficient than the system it replaces. The new system adds new functionality that is tailored to our needs,” said EastLink’s spokesperson, Doug Spencer-Roy. “Our new system is the state-of-the-art platform we need to support EastLink’s business innovation for the next decade.”
Sice’s managing director, Manuel Gonzalez Arrojo, commented, “The back office system project with EastLink has set the new benchmark for the tolling industry. The smooth data migration program has exceeded expectations, and improved upon previous successes of similar tolling system migrations in Australia. The most remarkable highlight is the new approach to the toll operator/tolling system developer relationship, which has provided value to both parties.”
