Overview
BDZ-Cargo, is a licensed railway transport operator working both internationally and within the Republic of Bulgaria. As the largest rail freight carrier in the country, the company partnered with Sirma to modernize and digitize its national freight operations. The result of this collaboration is a new Freight Management System (FMS), which has replaced disparate processes with a unified digital platform. This has created a scalable foundation for revenue growth, cost optimization, and enhanced customer experience.
Business Challenge
BDZ needed to manage the full complexity of wagonload, container, LTL, small-shipment, group, and block-train freight within a single, coherent system rather than multiple siloed tools and manual steps. The leadership’s challenge was to reduce operational friction and error rates, standardize processes, and gain real time visibility into performance, all while maintaining strict compliance in a mission critical national infrastructure environment.
Project Scope
The project digitized the end to end freight value chain - from order capture and shipment planning to delivery confirmation, fee calculation, billing, and reporting. By consolidating these capabilities into a single platform, BDZ reduced duplicate data entry, shortened processing cycles, and enabled a more consistent service experience for domestic and international freight customers.
Delivery
Sirma delivered an integrated FMS with tightly connected subsystems for operational control, commercial management, billing, documentation, and reporting. End to end online shipment management, automated fee calculation, and e services with qualified electronic signatures reduced manual workloads and paper handling, freeing staff to focus on higher value commercial and operational decisions.
Business Outcome
With the modern FMS in place, BDZ now operates on a single, integrated freight platform that supports:
- Higher operational efficiency due to fewer manual handoffs and errors, faster order-to-invoice cycles and improved asset and capacity utilisation.
- Better revenue assurance: standardised pricing and automated fee calculation reduce leakage, while integrated billing strengthens control over the entire revenue chain.
- Management visibility and control: consolidated reporting and status tracking allow you to make data-driven decisions about routes, products and customer segments, thereby improving profitability over time.
- Improved customer experience: more transparent processes, timely notifications and consistent documentation enhance trust, making BDZ more competitive than alternative modes of transport.
Technology Stack
The FMS was developed with a clear emphasis on achieving business objectives. It employs a modern, web-based Microsoft technology stack, including .NET, MS SQL, and various web technologies, as well as capabilities for qualified electronic signatures. This design choice aims to minimize operational risks and lower the total cost of ownership. As a result, our client has a reliable, secure, and flexible platform that can support new digital services, integrate with more partners, and adapt to regulatory and market changes without requiring frequent “rip-and-replace” investments.
Sirma x BDZ Partnership
BDZ chose Sirma because it could de risk the transformation: deep railway domain knowledge plus proven experience delivering large scale national systems. This combination gave BDZ executives confidence that the new platform would not only go live on time and on budget but would also generate tangible business value, higher process reliability, better utilization of rolling stock, and a digital foundation for new services and partnerships.
