Client
A leading freight transportation company.
To increase efficiency and agility, a leading freight transportation company sought to modernize its freight car service maintenance tracking systems. The goals were to minimize the time freight cars sat idle in maintenance shops and maximize freight car repair throughput.
Challenge
To achieve this transformation, the company needed to design and build a digital platform to completely replace its legacy paper-based processes. This would require the help of a consulting team with the technical competencies needed to:
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Design a bespoke digital platform that empowers maintenance shop workers to receive freight car maintenance instructions from the head office and input status updates on their maintenance progress in real-time.
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Enable head office employees across North America to receive freight car maintenance analytics in real-time.
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Lay the foundation to incorporate business analytics and artificial intelligence in future iterations.
Solution
To turn the company’s vision of transformation into reality, S.i. Systems’ Transportation IT solutions experts conducted a targeted search process to identify and assemble an agile project-oriented delivery (POD) team of consultants—composed of architects, software developers, data engineers, and QAs—with significant experience in leading greenfield digital transformation initiatives.
S.i. Systems supported the company through the entire solution design phase – creating a scalable and flexible architecture to meet their immediate maintenance service platform requirements and, more importantly, scale seamlessly as the platform’s business requirements evolved.
Results
With the new digital service maintenance platform, the transportation company could retrieve and update freight car maintenance status in real-time. The organization realized a 30% throughput improvement in just one year.
The platform is now a core component of the company’s operations, and S.i. Systems has continued to deliver a team of consultants. Currently, 23 consultants are onsite and actively involved with multiple projects designed to extend the capabilities of the new digital platform.