Purple Line Metro/Transit is one of the largest active transit infrastructure programs using TraceCloud — managing over 30,000 requirements across 300+ users on a $4 billion metro rail project. The team migrated entirely from Excel-based processes to TraceCloud, achieving full end-to-end traceability across systems engineering, signaling, rolling stock, civil infrastructure, and compliance verification.
The Challenge
Large-scale transit programs generate an enormous volume of requirements — from stakeholder needs and regulatory standards through system architecture, sub-system specifications, interface definitions, and verification test cases. Purple Line's $4B metro program was no exception.
Before TraceCloud, the team managed requirements across dozens of Excel spreadsheets. As the program scaled, the limitations became critical:
- Traceability was manual and fragile. Cross-referencing requirements between stakeholder needs, system requirements, and test cases across separate spreadsheets meant traceability links broke every time a file was updated or restructured.
- Impact analysis was guesswork. When a requirement changed, identifying every downstream artifact that needed review required manually searching through multiple files — a process that took hours and still missed connections.
- Version control was unreliable. With 300+ people across multiple engineering disciplines, spreadsheet version conflicts were a daily occurrence. Nobody was confident they were working from the latest baseline.
- Audit preparation was labor-intensive. Producing a complete traceability report for a compliance review meant manually assembling data from dozens of sources — a process measured in weeks.
Why TraceCloud
The Purple Line team evaluated several requirements management platforms before selecting TraceCloud. The deciding factors were:
- Scalability without complexity. TraceCloud needed to handle 30,000+ requirements and 300+ concurrent users without requiring months of implementation or specialized scripting expertise — unlike IBM DOORS, which would have required DXL customization and on-premises infrastructure.
- Practical Systems Engineering support. The team needed a tool that supported real-world SE workflows — not theoretical MBSE tooling, but configurable requirement types, structured hierarchies, approval workflows, and traceability that matched how their teams actually work.
- Two-way Excel sync. With hundreds of stakeholders, many of whom work primarily in Excel, the ability to import, export, edit offline, and re-import without data loss was non-negotiable.
- Dedicated support. On a $4B program, a delayed response from a vendor isn't an inconvenience — it's a program risk. TraceCloud's dedicated Technical Account Manager and guaranteed support response addressed this directly.
"TraceCloud has been a great tool for implementing practical Systems Engineering practices in the transit infrastructure industry. The customer support has been very helpful as well."
The Implementation
The migration from Excel to TraceCloud followed a phased approach:
Data Audit & Preparation
The team inventoried all existing spreadsheets, standardized requirement IDs and attribute formats, and organized data by requirement type — stakeholder needs, system requirements, sub-system specifications, interface requirements, and verification test cases.
Project Configuration
TraceCloud was configured to mirror the program's existing Systems Engineering process — including custom requirement types, folder hierarchies per subsystem (signaling, civil, rolling stock, power, communications), and multi-level approval workflows matching the project's governance structure.
Phased Import
Requirements were imported in hierarchy order — stakeholder needs first, then system-level requirements, then sub-system specifications, then test cases. Traceability links were established as each level was imported, using original Excel IDs as reference points.
Team Onboarding
300+ users were onboarded in waves — starting with core systems engineering leads, then expanding to discipline leads, reviewers, and stakeholder representatives. TraceCloud's included training program meant no external consulting was needed.
The Results
30,000+ requirements under live traceability
Every requirement — from top-level stakeholder needs through sub-system specifications to individual test cases — is connected in a single, navigable trace tree with automatic orphan and suspect link detection.
300+ users collaborating in real time
Engineers across signaling, civil, rolling stock, power, and communications disciplines work from a single source of truth — eliminating version conflicts and ensuring everyone reviews the current baseline.
Complete Excel migration achieved
The team fully migrated from spreadsheet-based requirements management to TraceCloud — with two-way Excel sync maintained for stakeholders who still need to work in spreadsheet format.
Audit-ready from day one
Every change is logged automatically with full attribution. Traceability reports that previously required weeks of manual assembly can now be generated on demand.
Key Takeaway
Purple Line demonstrates that TraceCloud operates at the same enterprise scale as IBM DOORS or Jama Connect — 30,000+ requirements, 300+ users, $4B program value — while delivering the setup speed, support quality, and cost efficiency that makes it practical for teams that don't want to spend months on tool implementation before they can manage their first requirement.
If your team is managing a complex, multi-disciplinary program on spreadsheets and knows the process isn't scaling, Purple Line's experience shows that migration is practical, the results are immediate, and the support is there when you need it.