About Four Nines

Four Nines Technologies knows the transit industry. We bring a unique approach to the work we do by leveraging creative thinking and problem solving during our projects. We blend flexibility and innovation with existing agency processes. Our end goal is always to achieve the highest quality project experience and project outcome for our clients.

The Transit Fare Specialists
Four Nines combines knowledge of topics from fare policy to information technology in order to provide our clients with unparalleled transit expertise. While the classifications below describe what we see as our primary project focuses, we know that nothing in transit occurs in a vacuum. On all of our projects, we leverage our diverse resources to bring a holistic understanding of the transit industry to our work.

Enterprise Systems
Enterprise software systems represent a significant investment for transit agencies. They play critical roles, supporting daily operations and management and touching numerous divisions. We help our clients make sure the systems they procure will truly meet their agency’s needs, both now and into the future. We do this by working with agency stakeholders, reviewing current systems, and investigating reporting needs to develop a set of functional requirements and future process flows that form the backbone of an enterprise system scope of work. Our proprietary requirements tool, containing over 4,000 general and transit-specific requirements, helps our team work with our clients to cover all areas of importance. We have worked with clients to procure a variety of enterprise systems, including fare collection systems, financial, supply chain, and human capital systems (Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP), planning and operational budgeting systems, and transit asset management systems (Enterprise Asset Management or EAM).

Strengthening Transit Financials
Four Nines works with our clients to identify ways to improve financial sustainability and the customer experience through fare policy. We help our clients identify and evaluate changes to fare pricing, structure, or policy that can help them meet their overarching goals, such as increasing revenue, streamlining fare payment and enabling more seamless connections, and improving equity. Using our Four Nines Fare Model, we are able to analyze how changes small and large will affect ridership and revenue. It is company policy that once a Fare Model is built for an agency, it is theirs to use as a continuing resource into the future, and we pride ourselves on having the confidence in our work to provide this high level of transparency. We are also cognizant of the importance of equity considerations when developing fare policy proposals and have completed many Title VI fare equity analyses for our clients as part of our fare studies.

System Implementation
Implementation of a new system brings huge change to an organization. Four Nines provides support for our clients in this phase to keep the project on track. We help the project manager and implementation team prepare for the necessary changes and define the activities, roles, and responsibilities that will be crucial to the success of the project. Key tasks we perform in this phase are assessing the readiness of stakeholders to adopt the new system and identifying potential obstacles as it rolls out. Communication between all parties is important, and we assist our clients in developing metrics and ways of engaging with their stakeholders, tracking issues and risks, and forming a steering committee for executive communication and escalation of issues.

Project Management Methodologies
Our project managers have experience with PMI, waterfall, and Agile as well as the use of a variety of modern tools like Jira, Asana and Teamwork. We have PMs certified by PMI as PMPs and Agile Certified Professionals, as well as ITIL certified professionals and CPAs. We focus on providing simple and efficient schedules and plans while still leveraging industry standards. Some projects might not warrant the rigor of a fully implemented framework, but our ability to use the language and some components enables all professionals to understand and operate in a common environment. In addition to traditional project management functions such as scheduling, budgeting, and task management, we enjoy problem solving and turning around projects that are lost or headed in the wrong direction.

Rigor Without Rigidity
Our team has deep experience in the transit industry, which means we know how to hold projects to a high standard while still having the flexibility to pursue innovative solutions. We have implemented creative approaches to gathering information in a number of areas to support this pursuit of innovative solutions. Our proprietary Requirements Tool serves as a repository of requirements for all types of enterprise system selections, from mobile apps to enterprise asset management systems. By starting with these standard sets of requirements, and then honing them in workshops with clients, we can customize the requirements to an agency and drastically speed up the procurement process without sacrificing quality in the scope of work.