The Challenge
Transport for London (TfL) faced an urgent challenge: Migrating over 20,000 critical engineering files from an obsolete, unsupported legacy system to their new application.
With increasing alerts about discontinued functionality being issued and the constant risk of complete data loss, Transport for London needed a solution to handle complex data migration while preserving the integrity of essential track engineering information.
The Product Register served as a ‘kit of parts’ catalogue which track designers used daily to select appropriate components for track construction.
Wrong product selections could result in safety issues, compliance failures, project delays and significant additional costs.
Working with Netcall, Transport for London successfully deployed Liberty RPA, our robotic process automation solution, to automate the entire data migration process, completing what would have been over 2,000 hours of manual work whilst maintaining perfect data accuracy and preserving critical reference numbers into a new Product Information System (which is built in Liberty Create, our low-code solution).
The Solution
Transport for London’s track engineering team relied heavily on a legacy product register system containing irreplaceable information about track products used throughout their network.
The decades-old system had become obsolete, unsupported and undocumented, with regular alerts about discontinued functionality.
Parts had already stopped working, creating an urgent risk that Transport for London could lose critical data without warning.
The documents weren’t stored as traditional files but had to be recreated on-the-fly through user interactions. Each of the approximately 20,000 files required the system to mimic a complete user journey before it could be generated and saved.
Manual migration would have taken more than 2,000 hours of skilled engineering time and been prone to human error.
Transport for London worked closely with Netcall to develop a replacement solution, built in Liberty Create, alongside a sophisticated Liberty RPA solution that could handle the complex migration while minimizing the impact on the business and public access.
The Liberty RPA bots replicated the exact user interactions required to access each document, generate the files on-the-fly and save them to the new Product Information Register application with the appropriate metadata.
The solution also preserved critical reference numbers, ensuring existing documentation and cross-references remained valid.
Transport for London conducted extensive testing to ensure the automation worked correctly, while sample checking throughout the migration ensured high data quality.
The migration was completed in time for business validation, allowing track engineering colleagues to verify that all data and documents had been correctly transferred before the new system went live.
The Result
- 2,000+ hours saved – eliminated manual work equivalent to more than one person-year to complete
- Data integrity – successfully migrated 20,000 critical engineering files with zero data loss
- Preserved references – maintained original product reference numbers, so existing documentation remained valid for internal and public use
- Risk mitigation – eliminated the risk of catastrophic data loss from the obsolete legacy system
- Quality assurance – systematic, error-free data migration, which didn’t require additional checking and validation
- Business continuity – seamless transition to Liberty Create without disrupting track engineering operations
- Cost avoidance – from recreating lost data, repeated testing and project delays
- Employee experience – avoided assigning tedious, manual work to skilled engineering staff
- Customer experience – minimal disruption
“The manual alternative would have required over a person-year of work, a soul-destroying task which would’ve taken longer than we had before the system failed.
Using Liberty RPA eliminated this burden entirely and negated the inevitable human errors. Our skilled engineers could focus on their core expertise instead of being forced into a data entry task.“ Andy Gordon, Principal Engineering Leader, Engineering Delivery Optimisation, Transport for London.
This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Netcall – View the Original Article
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Author: Netcall
Reviewed by: Jo Robinson
Published On: 13th Aug 2026
Read more about - Industry News, Case Studies, Netcall
