Lineas
Delivering A More Sustainable, More Productive World

Lineas is the largest private rail freight operator in Europe, offering complete door-to-door rail-based transport solutions. The company’s purpose is to convince customers to shift the transport of their goods from road to rail, thereby optimizing their supply chain while also positively impact climate and mobility. To assure their customers’ goods are delivered smoothly and safely across the Continent, it’s critical that Lineas’ systems are always online, running flawlessly, 24/7, 365 days a year.

That’s why Lineas decided to partner with ControlUp. ControlUp allows Lineas staff and partners to work efficiently wherever they are while ensuring uninterrupted supply chains and making sure customers are getting what they need when they need it.

“Lineas is using ControlUp to its utmost and it has changed our world for the better.” — Nils Joossens, Chief IT Administrator, Lineas

Lineas is not just another shipping company. In 2017, the previously state-owned rail freight specialist was rebranded Lineas. The company has since become the largest private rail freight operator in Europe, with offices in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain.

Following its transformation into a privatel yheld company, Lineas decided to overhaul all of its IT systems, moving to Citrix Workspace and Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops from their legacy infrastructure. For Lineas, a major element of this changeover was keeping everything manageable.

Enter ControlUp.

To ensure business continuity while, at the same time avoiding any compromise in terms of exemplary employee experience, Lineas turned to ControlUp. Lineas supports 24/7 services across multiple countries. As trains cross borders, different entities are responsible for the trains’ bills of lading and for getting goods to their respective destinations on time. For Lineas, there is no room for downtime.

ControlUp allows Lineas to address problems quickly.

Nils Joossens, Lineas’ Chief IT Administrator, says: “At one time there was an incident where ControlUp immediately proved its value. A bug in our environment that wasn’t detected during our regular testing caused all printing capabilities to fail. For Lineas, this is a serious hiccup as our operators must be able to produce bills of lading for customs purposes when crossing borders. Without these documents on hand, the train cannot continue its journey. In short, when printing stops, the whole business comes to a halt. With ControlUp, however, we were able to identify the problem and have it fixed in less than ten minutes. The quick fix made possible thanks to ControlUp saved us several days of work.”

For Lineas, keeping the focus on the front end of the business was of the utmost importance. They didn’t want any issues caused by errant IT infrastructure problems.

“If you keep things manageable, you can work where you should work. For us, ControlUp enables us to keep the focus where it should be: on the business, itself.” — Nils Joossens, Chief IT Administrator, Lineas

Nils Joossens, Systems & Network Engineer at Lineas, oversees the system’s performance, from networking to their virtual apps and desktops deployments. So it’s imperative that they have a digital experience monitoring and optimization solution that delivers on its promises.

“I start every day with ControlUp,” Joossens says. “I wake up and the first thing I do is look at the console to see the status of everything, so I don’t have to worry.”

Lineas uses ControlUp for monitoring, but for them, ControlUp Automate is the most powerful part of the platform and what sets it apart from the competition. “ControlUp’s automation capabilities help us fix things before they become problems for our users. I can focus on my other tasks, without having to worry over our systems’ performance as ControlUp is set up to keep our systems running smoothly and efficiently,” Joossens says. “The other tools we evaluated required monitoring, digging through scores of data, then fixing problems on the server. Now, I can do it all in ControlUp. I can monitor, mitigate and tackle issues quickly.”

Time is Money

Lineas’ prides itself on delivering quality and reliable services. Trains should run on schedule and goods must be delivered in full and on time. As a consequence, it is crucial to be able to identify the root cause of problems and to come up with a fix fast. ControlUp saves Lineas and Joossens at least an hour a day or 260 hours on a yearly basis, on standard checks alone. “Without ControlUp, the daily health-check on the Lineas environment would take too much time,” Joossens states. “With ControlUp, this daily routine takes no more than 10 minutes, freeing up a lot of time to spend on value-added tasks,” he adds.”

Better productivity, better business, better world.

We live and work in a time and world where keeping supply chains running reliably is more important than ever. People and businesses across Europe are increasingly dependent on shipping services, so it’s imperative that Lineas’ teams are able to stay productive. ControlUp helps Lineas to keep its systems running smoothly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, and because it’s so simple, Joossens is able to manage a farm of more than 1500 users with ease. “We are using ControlUp to its utmost and it has changed our world for the better, he states.”