Case study: How NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi brings complex transport research together with Harmoni

Background

NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA) is the Crown entity responsible for supporting and regulating New Zealand’s land transport system. The agency oversees driver and vehicle licensing, maintains the state highway network, and works across eight business groups and regional relationships teams to keep people safe on roads and public transport. With millions of drivers, vehicles, and inspections each year, NZTA relies on robust insights to guide strategy, operations, and public safety initiatives.

The challenge

NZTA’s customer insights program is multi-faceted, including monitoring and service development research around how people travel, experiences and unmet needs, our state highway network, multimodal travel, safety, stakeholders, and transactional voice of customer. These programs are delivered alongside several research partners and supported by multiple tools and platforms.

With data arriving from different sources in various formats, the team must manage regular reporting alongside deeper analysis informing exploratory and formative research. NZTA brings together information to deep dive into experience and needs of demographic, behavioural and regional groups to inform a wide variety of needs including policy advice, product, service and marketing development, modelling and performance reporting. As expectations grow and more diverse data is available, the team looks for ways to work efficiently while maintaining a supplier-agnostic approach.

“For us at NZTA Waka Kotahi, Harmoni has become a reliable foundation for managing and analysing our complex tracking programs. With the support of the Infotools team, we’re able to bring insights from across our transport research together in a way that supports day-to-day decisions and longer-term strategy.”  

The solution

Infotools Harmoni plays a central role in supporting NZTA’s major multi-wave programs. The platform provides a consistent environment for data loading, demographic cuts and recurring reporting. Viewer licenses allow broader access across the organisation and the wider sector. The ability to pull information together from different monitors supports the team’s goal of building unified stories from their research. As additional studies adopt consistent variables, NZTA plans to bring more datasets into Harmoni for streamlined analysis.

NZTA noted that the Infotools team is highly responsive, helpful, and knowledgeable, providing support that gives the agency confidence in loading and working with a wide range of datasets. This is important both for sophisticated analysis, and for supporting teams with a wide range of skills to understand their customers.

Impact

Through Harmoni, NZTA is able to:

• Support efficient reporting for large and on-going programs.
• Produce deeper or additional cuts when needed while maintaining turnaround times
• Provide clear visibility for stakeholders through dashboards and shared access, as well as supporting creation of compelling static presentations.
• Analyse connections across monitors more easily.
• Reduce time spent preparing data from multiple sources.
• Leverage one platform for both large scale monitoring and tactical ad-hoc analysis.

The team has seen the value of this approach during internal sessions where they used Harmoni to explore transport data with their modelling colleagues, who found it easy to view patterns and compare results across datasets. This experience helped reinforce the potential for connecting multiple monitors in a single environment.

Together, these benefits help the team keep up with the growing demand for timely, reliable insights across their research program.

Looking ahead

NZTA is exploring opportunities to further strengthen its analytic capabilities, including geographic enhancements, enhanced analysis of open-text feedback, AI applications and integration with additional transport datasets. As the insights program grows, the team continues to see value in tools that support consistency, dependability and ease of access.