Published on 27-Sep-2011
" We were able to achieve our planned benefits, and then leverage our investment further for other non-EDI applications. This was part of the vision when Sterling B2B Integrator was purchased, and realizing this vision resulted in savings for those development activities." - Ralph Ibera, Technical Director, CSX Technology
Customer:
CSX Transportation
Industry:
Travel & Transportation
Deployment country:
United States
Solution:
Smarter Commerce
Overview
CSX Transportation (CSX), provides a crucial link to the transportation supply chain through its approximately 21,000 mile rail network, which serves every major population center in 23 states east of the Mississippi River, the District of Columbia, and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. It serves 70 ocean, river and lake ports along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, the Mississippi River, the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway. CSX also serves thousands of production and distribution facilities through track connections to more than 230 short-line and regional railroads.
Business need:
To establish a cost effective, high
performance platform for both internal
and external communications
Solution:
IBM® Sterling B2B Integrator®
Benefits:
• 18 monthsStreamlines processes•Offers flexible business solutions
Case Study
Business challenge
While looking to streamline business processes and reduce operating expenses for customers, CSX determined the need for a new mechanism to manage data interchange with customers, vendors, suppliers, and other railroads. Their previous method of going through multiple VANs for these orders led to a number of issues, such as having no data transformation, limited flexibility, and no ability to determine why a transfer failed. Most importantly, however, was the high cost CSX and their customers were incurring to process electronic data interchange. Their new application would need to offer peer-to- peer communications without requiring them to go through third party VANs, and offer more automated electronic communications. Without a centralized system on their end, CSX required the flexibility necessary to offer their customers the best service possible.
Solution
IBM® Sterling B2B Integrator helps make it faster and easier to build, deploy, and manage B2B solutions across diverse business partner communities. Sterling B2B Integrator is a development and integration platform that eliminates barriers to effective business collaboration and enables the user to extend security-rich, managed process visibility beyond the edge of their enterprise.
Sterling B2B Integrator has provided CSX with an easy-to-use, cost-effective application, which has helped optimize and transform their processing of customer orders and eliminated the high cost of having to go through multiple VANs. In fact, CSX was able to achieve their return on investment within 18 months after the implementation of Sterling B2B Integrator (based on a formal audit completed by CSX).
After implementation, CSX quickly discovered other innovative ways to use Sterling B2B Integrator in addition to EDI Mapping. Sterling B2B Integrator has allowed for Enterprise Application Integration within CSX, and has allowed CSX smooth and security-rich integration from their existing applications to newly developed systems. They were able to create an internal cash application, which receives a single payment detail from the bank and is then able to be broken down by their individual customers. Over two billion dollars flow through this application annually. In addition, CSX is using Sterling B2B Integrator as a service bus to process GPS events from locomotives and enrich them with geographic and train assignment data, and then make this information available to downstream locomotive and train management systems.
Key benefits
Sterling B2B Integrator has given CSX a centralized system, helping to eliminate the high cost of having to process orders from their customers via multiple VANs. Return on investment was realized within 18 months after implementation.
Sterling B2B Integrator has enabled CSX to more easily extend their automated processes across enterprise boundaries, virtually regardless of their business partners’ differing connectivity technologies, policies, procedures, preferences, and priorities. When new trading partners are added, a custom map is built and put into Sterling B2B Integrator. According to Todd Wilson, Manager Business Integration, CSX Transportation, prior to Sterling B2B Integrator, “...the process of adding a new payment company would take up to two days, which can now be done within 10 minutes.”
Sterling B2B Integrator is designed to enable CSX to seamlessly orchestrate global supply chains and partner communities despite differences in partner size and type. Sterling B2B Integrator has the agility to keep pace with the shifting requirements of CSX’s partner community.
Products and services used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Software:
Sterling B2B Integrator
Legal Information
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