Published on 30-Sep-2009
"IBM WebSphere ILOG JRules has been a great investment for us. It gives us compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and automates where only manual processes were used. Operating efficiency is up and missing dollars are coming in. We have visibility into our business that we never had before" - Transport services company
Customer:
Top 5 U.S. Transportation and Logistics Company
Industry:
Travel & Transportation
Deployment country:
United States
Solution:
Service Oriented Architecture
Overview
A resource-hungry focus for many companies in the transportation industry is compliance with regulations—in particular those driven by Sarbanes-Oxley. This transport services company has achieved success here with their billing and payroll systems.
Business need:
Operating out of more than 300 sites, the company depends heavily on their IT systems to meet contracts. To bring coherence to its billing and payroll systems, the company decided to centralize the contract management systems used by its Dedicated Contract Services Division and support them with powerful software for implementing policies.
Solution:
The solution was to centralize the systems to ensure consistency and compliance. This led them to IBM® WebSphere® ILOG JRules, the top seller in the business rule management system (BRMS) market. The company created a flexible management environment that greatly improved operations and compliance with industry regulations in just nine months.
Benefits:
Increased revenue through billing of contractual activities that were being missed with manual systems
More accurate payroll management through automation
Faster billing cycles from more comprehensive invoices derived from rules for rate management
Externalized reporting of key performance indicators
Case Study
This transport services company is one of the largest transportation logistics companies in North America. It provides customized freight movement, revenue equipment, labor and systems services tailored to meet their customers' requirements.
Challenge
The company’s billing and payroll systems were spread out over 300 sites. This made safeguarding, maintaining and updating them extremely complex. By bringing their management under one roof, the company can better control the applications and keep them in synch with operations and regulations. JRules makes this solution possible by providing a central repository for storing the rules applied by the systems. Changes are made to the rules in the repository and automatically disseminated to the billing and payroll applications. This enables personnel throughout their network of offices to benefit immediately from changes to the rules.
Solution
The initial release took about 11 man-months to make. As many as 25 developers participated in the project, with up to eight focusing on the JRules module. The module constituted about 20 percent of the project. The company credits IBM Professional Services with much of the success of the project. The consultants played a critical role in addressing technical issues, taught project developers how to use JRules and helped define the architecture of the rule module.
Benefits
Central management
Faster implementation of policies
Compliance with Sarbane-Oxley and other regulations
Products and services used
Software
• IBM® WebSphere® ILOG JRules
Services
• IBM® ILOG Professional Services
Products and services used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Software:
WebSphere ILOG JRules
Legal Information
IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com and WebSphere are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. If these and other IBM trademarked terms are marked on their first occurrence in this information with a trademark symbol (® or ™), these symbols indicate U.S. registered or common law trademarks owned by IBM at the time this information was published. Such trademarks may also be registered or common law trademarks in other countries. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at “Copyright and trademark information” at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml Other product, company or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. This case study is an example of how one customer uses IBM products. There is no guarantee of comparable results. References in this publication to IBM products and services do not imply that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates.