Lumenor Consulting Group

Lumenor Consulting Group is a certified DBE consulting firm with offices in Alpharetta, Georgia, New York, NY and Washington, DC. Founded in 2007, Lumenor provides strategic advisory services to public transit agencies and other government and private sector organizations whose operations include a significant transportation component.  

For organizations seeking guidance on how to integrate and implement new technologies into their operations, Lumenor offers a range of consulting services, including project management and support, enterprise asset management, systems assessment, organizational change management,business process transformation, data governance, automated fare collection and more.  

In its thirteen years of operation, Lumenor has helped transit organizations like the NY Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), Los Angeles Metro (LA METRO), Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) and Jacksonville Transportation Authority (JTA) to evaluate and implement major systems upgrades, in ways that deliver increased transparency into operations, greater compliance with current regulations, and the capacity to act on new insights in systematic ways.

In addition to its extensive list of transit customers, the company has also provided services to major commercial businesses such as Starbucks Coffee Company, Sony Corporation, and The Coca-Cola Company.

Committed to Deliver Quality Business Solutions 

In 2005, Lumenor Consulting CEO Bridgette Beato led a $200 million project to modernize fare collection for the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) with the first 100 percent smart card system in North America. 

Two years later in 2007, Bridgette launched Lumenor to address the public transit industry’s widespread need for technological innovation and expertise. All across the country, she had realized, there were thousands of public transit systems that functioned as vital civic and economic infrastructure to the communities where they were situated – and yet many of them were using systems and equipment that were decades out of date.  

In Bridgette’s estimation, helping these agencies modernize their operations through more strategic use of technology and processes was both a significant business opportunity and a way to improve the livability, sustainability, and economic productivity of key metropolitan regions throughout North America. Since Lumenor’s founding thirteen years ago, the company has grown from a team of two to its current 20-plus employees, and its work has helped improve the daily transportation routines for tens of millions of people.

A Transformational Leader

Bridgette Beato is the CEO of Lumenor Consulting Group. For more than two decades, she has helped many of the largest public transit agencies in North America to implement new technologies and services that increase their efficiency, stay compliant with government regulations, and improve the services they offer to users. From the start, Bridgette has focused on helping public transit agencies stay adaptive in the face of shifting cultural patterns and major technological change. Her expertise in information technology and change management has kept Lumenor at the forefront of new technology developments and trends, and made the company an indispensable partner to transit agencies that want to stay relevant and accessible to the communities they serve.

Bridgette has also made it a priority to build a company culture that values its employees as much as the clients they serve. The positive, growth-oriented work environment she has created has attracted talent that helps Lumenor deliver world-class service from the framework of a boutique firm. Keeping the company lean means every Principal, Practice Lead, and Project Manager has a deep engagement with the clients Lumenor serves.

Enabling Businesses to Achieve Efficiency

The transportation sector is evolving quickly, with more providers offering more options to users. Over the last decade, Lumenor has seen the emergence of transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft; the rapid evolution of electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles; and widely changing expectations from potential riders about how they want the services they use to work. 

In this increasingly complex environment, Lumenor Consulting believes public transit agencies can achieve a significant competitive advantage by focusing on their core assets and competencies. Trains, buses, tracks, and other core assets of public transit agencies are extremely capital-intensive to build and thus hard to duplicate. That could easily lead to complacency, but ultimately the way to fully leverage the competitive advantage public transit agencies derive from these assets is to ensure that they’re performing optimally. 

Part of how Lumenor Consulting serves the public transit industry involves implementing enterprise-wide systems that make it easier to manage asset maintenance and stay in compliance with all current safety regulations. By instrumentizing assets through well-designed systems, transit agencies gain access to enormous quantities of data about vehicle locations, impending maintenance, traffic signaling and outages, work scheduling, and more.

Along with helping transit agencies achieve greater operating efficiencies with their core assets, Lumenor can also help agencies with organizational re-alignments, strategic communications, systems integration, assessments around automated fare collection, data services, business process transformation, and other aspects of the business focused on efficient and cost-effective organizations, systems and processes.

AMethodology that Integrates People, Processes, and Technology

Lumenor understands that bringing new technology to an organization is only part of a successful engagement – especially in public transit. In this domain, legacy equipment, institutional constraints, and long-standing organizational expectations and assumptions all play significant roles in how things get done, and thus, which innovations get successfully adopted and which get merely tolerated or even worse, ignored.  

That’s why the company utilizes a methodology that integrates people, processes, and technology – so that change is not just delivered but also effectively embraced in ways that meet project objectives and achieve the targeted goals.

Lumenor’s track record with successfully engaging with North America’s leading public transit agencies has also helped it attract world-class partners that help strengthen its overall efforts. Some of these partners include ABB, Copperleaf, AMTSybex, Infor, Trapeze and DXC Technology.

Overcoming Challenges for Growth

The massive investments in physical infrastructure and equipment that public transit systems, airports, highways and the other kinds of projects Lumenor works on require literally entrench certain approaches and business models. In addition, projects often take years and in some cases even decades to complete, and they all tend to come with unique political realities – in terms of how funding for projects have been secured, what local stakeholders have input on decision-making, and what sort of latitude public transit agencies have or don’t have when it comes to evolving their operations. All of these factors can contribute to institutional inertia. While public transit and other major transportation infrastructure are key to a region’s collective economic prosperity and progress, they are, in some ways, surprisingly static industries. A typical metropolitan subway station of today doesn’t necessarily look or operate all that differently than it did fifty years ago. 

Over time, that has started to change, as the agencies and other organizations that make up the industry have begun to embrace the improved services and increases in efficiency that modern IT systems and a mindset more attuned to continuous improvement can deliver. But as a small consulting firm pushing huge public agencies that have often been serving millions of users a day for decades, Lumenor recognizes that agencies aren’t going to make major changes unless it can (a) provide them with extremely compelling reasons to do so, and (b) point to a track record of success. When Lumenor was just starting out, this latter point was certainly a challenge, because the company was new to the industry. Since then, Lumenor has had the fortune to work with many of the largest public transit agencies in North America. So while getting agencies to embrace change in an environment where change is difficult remains a complex process, it has gotten easier.

Business Excellence and Recognition 

Bridgette Beato serves as a Director on the Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS) International board and has been a member for 15 years. In 2018 and 2019, she was named one of the 100 Most Influential Women in Georgia. That same year, Lumenor was featured on the cover of American DBE. The positive feedback and repeat business from the company’s clients are a testament to its commitment to maintaining strong customer relationships. 

The Future of Public Transit

Even before the coronavirus outbreak and the uncertainty that has created in terms of how people will adapt their work lives and living patterns in the face of ongoing health concerns, the transportation and public transit industries were in a state of flux.

On the one hand, population continues to concentrate on the country’s largest cities and suburbs. Of the approximately 20,000 incorporated cities in the U.S., just 775 of them have a population of 50,000 or greater – but these places account for 40 percent of the entire U.S. population, or roughly 127 million people. In addition to population concentration, there’s also a growing awareness of environmental sustainability and resource management, and rising expectations regarding mobility and livability in general. Today, more and more people assume that the physical world should operate with the speed and efficiency of the digital world – a life that can be managed effortlessly with a few clicks of a button.

All of these factors play into increased demand for the seamless turnkey user experiences a public transit system can deliver – as long as it’s effectively designed and operationalized. Over the last decade especially, the world has seen the emergence of new forms of urban and suburban transport – including transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft, bike-sharing systems, and more. Greater competition for riders, especially from well-funded for-profit companies that must either increase market share or die, means that public transit agencies must also deliver new levels of efficiency and customer service in order to maintain, much less increase ridership.  

Coronavirus complicates this picture. For at least the next few years, riders are likely to have considerable safety concerns about the transportation options they choose. To succeed in this new environment, public transit agencies must move forward with a responsive and innovative mindset. What can they do to increase user safety? How do the effectively implement and communicate the steps they are taking? All of these efforts start with having more comprehensive and actionable data about asset management, ridership patterns, and various other factors that a well-designed system can measure and monitor with new levels of transparency and insight. 

Lumenor Consulting exists to help public transit agencies and other organizations within the larger transportation sector to take full advantage of the latest technologies and approaches. As such systems become even more necessary in the current complex and evolving environment, the company is ready to help public transit and the transportation industry stay vital and highly responsive to the communities they serve.