Student Affairs staff implement transit pass migration project
As of Sept. 1, 2023, the Buff OneCard ID is now used as a transit pass for all enrolled CU students and benefited employees and CU Boulder no longer issues CollegePasses or EcoPasses. Completing this migration has simplified processes and improved transit experiences for CU Boulder community members. Student Affairs staff members played an important role in completing this project.
The backstory
RTD recently contracted with a new vendor, Masabi, to provide a new fare and ticketing platform. They had plans to cease operating their old platform on Sept. 28, 2023. In August 2022, the first meeting about an integration took place with CU staff, RTD and Masabi in attendance. During that meeting, RTD shared that they would not be building or providing any kind of management interface for CU Boulder to manage passes. It was then decided that CU would build something themselves.
- Paul Stallworth, assistant director of business solutions in Student Affairs Information Technology (SA IT)
- Mark Fleming, data warehouse engineer in SA IT
- Matt Davenport, business intelligence developer in SA IT
- Sarah Bradley, campus card manager in the Buff OneCard Office
- Brandon Smith, transportation program manager in the Environmental Center
- Clark Rider, sustainable transportation specialist in Infrastructure and Sustainability
The project
The old process involved the Buff OneCard Office collecting EcoPass and CollegePass card numbers in an offline Access database, and sending a spreadsheet to the Environmental Center and Transportation to submit to RTD. This meant new card numbers were not able to be activated in a timely fashion—it could sometimes take weeks before cards were active. Deactivating cards was equally as painful, as a list would have to be generated from CU and then passes were manually deactivated with RTD's system.
Over the course of a few months, members of the CU project team met to map out the logic that determines whether a card holder is eligible for a pass and what kind of pass they should receive. To determine pass eligibility, the team identified 20 business rules that were evaluated across five data sources. With that information, SA IT embarked on the development of an integration between the Buff OneCard card production system and the Masabi platform.
The outcome
Mark Fleming designed and developed 77 database objects, 14 integration packages and three scheduled jobs over six months to process all the logic for CollegePasses and EcoPasses. Once the major integration functions were in place, Matt Davenport developed a Power App. This app would be used by the Buff OneCard Office, Environmental Center and Transportation and would allow them to look up patrons and issue passes to them in real-time, transmitting the pass information to the Masabi platform immediately upon submission. The creation of this app and integration meant that for the first time when patrons get a new card printed in the Buff OneCard office, they could expect their card to work that day.
To successfully migrate from the existing CollegePass and EcoPass cards to the Buff OneCard IDs, all existing eligible pass holders would need to be uploaded to the Masabi platform. Masabi does not provide methods for bulk upload of information, so the team had to plan sending approximately 50,000 riders information to the Masabi platform, one at a time. The process requires two steps to finalize the pass, resulting in 100,000 interface transactions that took nine hours to complete. With that bulk load complete, sending the daily updates only takes about five minutes. This also saves who no longer need to send and manage lists for 50,000 people.
Additionally, the flexible design of this process allows for new rules or updates to be made based on pass eligibility. It will also be easy to create reports on factors like total passes issued, when passes are issued, what types of passes are issued and other metrics.
All CU students and benefitted staff no longer have to keep track of multiple cards. Your Buff OneCard gives you access to RTD bus and rail routes, including routes to Denver International Airport. Get more bus route and bus pass information.