SMS technology cuts costs and improves communication

Tube Lines, the company maintaining and upgrading the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly underground lines, is saving 40 per cent on SMS communications following the implementation of new technology.

The company installed a web-based SMS platform when it realised managers could not communicate with internal employees quickly enough.

Thousands of messages can now be sent instantly, rather than taking up to a quarter of an hour, while shaving 40 per cent of the cost of each text.

Messages are distributed to employees via text message from a computer in the Control Centre, which is the communications hub for Tube Lines. All incidents relating to infrastructure and emergency situations are managed from the centre.

Therefore, it is critical that Tube Lines deploys the most effective and reliable communication method to inform relevant employees of any incidents that could affect Tube Lines operations.

But Tube Lines was experiencing severe delays with its communications infrastructure, with text messages being sent singularly to individual mobile phones handsets and not being delivered and distributed rapidly enough.

Duty operations engineer Peter Radley implemented SMS technology from The Messaging Centre and first tested it on a small group of managers before rolling it out across the firm.

‘Since deploying the technology we now have real-time awareness of problems on our lines, enabling a much more rapid response than previously possible,’ he said.

The project exceeded cost savings goals by reducing the annual spend on SMS communication by almost half. It also offered robustness, reliability and speed of the communications system, withstanding the extra strain of updates on July 7 last year.