Case Study: Nederlandse Spoorwegen achieves a real-time, accessible digital customer experience in four weeks with Mendix

Digitalizing Customer Experience in Four Weeks with Dutch Railways

Dutch Railways (Nederlandse Spoorwegen, NS), the Netherlands’ largest passenger operator, faced a steep ridership drop during the COVID-19 pandemic and urgently needed a way to help passengers travel safely with social distancing. Lacking a seat-reservation system and relying on historical crowd data, NS had to deliver real-time capacity and availability, meet rapidly changing regulations, ensure high uptime and accessibility, and scale to hundreds of thousands of users — with an MVP slated in just four weeks.

Working with First Technology, NS ran an accelerated design sprint and built Treinwijzer, a real-time travel planner that shows live seat and bicycle availability, allows reservations, and sends notifications. The team rolled it out in five staged communities (pilot, bicycle, general, accessibility, campaign) and used techniques like client-side nanoflows, a denormalized data model, CMS-driven content, queuing, and performance diagnostics to optimize speed and reliability. Launched in four weeks, Treinwijzer now serves about 260,000 monthly users and handles roughly 30,000 registrations and 5,500 emails per day, delivering a scalable, high-performing, and accessible digital experience.

Nederlandse Spoorwegen