About Yarra Trams

In Melbourne, Australia, Yarra Trams (operated by Keolis Downer) is the largest tram network in the world, with 250 kilometers of double track, a fleet of 500 trams and a team of 2600 dedicated employees working around the clock to provide safe, reliable and efficient public transport to millions of passengers each year. 

Yarra Trams is committed to delivering sustainable and customer-focused services, with a strong focus on safety and passenger experience. Yarra Trams has been a key player in Melbourne's public transport sector and continues to be at the forefront of innovation and technology in the industry.

‍Challenges

Every employee at Yarra Trams is trained and measured on their ability to provide safe, reliable, and efficient public transport to millions of passengers each year. 

Previous recognition practices were disparate, with variable budgets and different schemes that varied by department. 

Other challenges included:

• No analytical abilities to measure the program's final redemption costs 
• Administrative overhead from department heads and payroll in procuring and distributing physical gifts 
• Administrative overhead of determining benefit in kind taxes, where applicable 
• No free flow of communication between the current HRIS system and the reward platform. 

Yarra Trams decided to switch to a digital-first and automated rewards platform that would seamlessly integrate with their current HXM Suite, as well as:

• offer meaningful local and global choices of gift cards and experiences to employees
• provide employees with complete control over the redemption process 
• leverage existing reporting and free reward and recognition functionality through SuccessFactors
• eliminate any new IT build and minimize set-up and configuration time and resources. 

Solution 

Integration with Xoxoday’s rewards and incentives platform - Plum- allowed Yarra Trams to enhance employee recognition by leaders, managers, and peers with minimal IT effort, leveraging existing enterprise IT investment in SAP SuccessFactors. 

• Plum’s integration has given Yarra Trams full control over the reward program they craft for their employees. 
• Employees can accumulate the points awarded over time for performance and ‘moments that matter’ and redeem them within the core HR platform. 
• Employees can choose the brand and denomination of rewards from Plum’s global catalog, making the redemption process more engaging for the employees. 
• With Plum’s user-friendly UI, the employees quickly deployed and widely adopted the platform in no time. 

What’s next? 

Yarra Trams has plans to explore several opportunities to further improve their employee rewards program, including scaling up and innovating the program to include more employees and teams, optimizing it based on feedback and data analytics and exploring new ways to personalize it.

“The support team was with us at every step of this transition. From onboarding to sending rewards, they were always eager to answer all our questions without judgment.”