Norfolk Southern Switches to Efficiency, Visibility, and Customer Service
Blog: The Tibco Blog
Norfolk Southern is a leading North American transportation provider. Its Norfolk SouthernRailway Company subsidiary operates approximately 20,000 route miles in 22 states and theDistrict of Columbia, serves every major container port in the Eastern US, provides efficient connections to other rail carriers, operates the most extensive intermodal network in the East, and is a major transporter of coal, automotive, and industrial products.
“Norfolk Southern is a very asset-intensive business, and we have to be very careful about how we manage these assets,” explains Fred Ehlers, vice president of information technology. “Our business is going through tremendous change, from handling bulk commodity industrial products to consumer goods using intermodal containers, which is really where the growth is. With that growth comes service sensitivity and customer demand for knowing where their product is and that it’s going to get to the destination on time.”
The company’s objective was to provide very high-quality service, but it was challenged by legacy point-to-point messaging solutions and spending a lot of time rebuilding services. Dated and inconsistent information were slowing progress.
“Our technology objective was to modernize our key systems,” says Bob Miller, manager of enterprise architecture. “We wanted high-performance technology that would allow us to create a common, real-time view of core assets—railcars, locomotives, crews, and locations—and analytics to provide a 360-degree view of the state of the railroad to help the business make more informed decisions.”
The organization leveraged the TIBCO Fast Data platform to create a central model that reflects the current state of the railway using vital data from multiple sources—and won a TIBCO Trailblazer award for its efforts. Using TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks, TIBCO Enterprise Message Service, TIBCO BusinessEvents, and TIBCO Spotfire, the company dramatically streamlined and eliminated multiple views of operations.
Read the full Norfolk Southern story for details on the systems it integrated and the results brought about by operational efficiency, superior asset utilization, and improved customer service.
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