Those improvements alone have saved the company several million dollars annually in labor costs, says Tennison. That application has almost completely eliminated the need for customer service agents to make corrections on orders and bills of lading, says Malley, who is the NetControl project leader. The system helps catch any disparities and "fix them for good," says Brandl. Union Pacific automated many of those processes in the new platform by applying a rules-based system under an electronic shipment services application that was implemented in August 2004. When that occurred, customer service representatives had to manually edit the orders. When freight customers sent electronic orders through the mainframe system, information in the orders didn't always match up with data in Union Pacific's records - for example, there might have been differences between location codes, says Tennison. For instance, more than 99% of the railroad's customer orders are generated electronically over the Web and through EDI feeds, says Linda Brandl, vice president in charge of Union Pacific's 400-person national customer service center. Union Pacific is working to address those types of requirements in NetControl, which is in the third year of a multiyear design effort and about 30% complete. Those companies are now counting on railroads to provide more services that are easier to access. In recent years, many freight customers have downsized or outsourced their shipping departments, says Chip Kraft, director of operations planning at Transportation Economics & Management Systems Inc., a Frederick, Md.-based consulting firm. Union Pacific also wanted to develop a system that would improve customers' interactions with the company and help drive internal productivity gains, says Tennison. Many IT workers who are familiar with the mainframe-based system are nearing retirement age, and "most colleges and universities don't even teach assembler," he says. The project was conceived in part because Union Pacific was having difficulty recruiting IT workers with macro assembler skills to maintain and enhance the older system, says Senior Vice President and CIO Lynden Tennison. The SOA project will cost $150 million to $200 million, and the system is expected to become fully operational by the end of 2013, at which time the company plans to phase out the IBM mainframe. Components of the new transportation control system are being deployed in stages to help Union Pacific better manage more than 90,000 railcars and 32,000 miles of track.
It is being written in J2EE and runs on Linux.
#Netcontrol 4ru1t1a software#
The emerging network, dubbed NetControl, is based on a service-oriented architecture platform that relies heavily on open-source technologies such as the Apache Web server, Hibernate query software and SpringSource's Java application management tools. But thanks to a new distributed network that has been in development since 2006, the company has been able to introduce some of that functionality and much more. The old system wouldn't have been able to handle that change, he says. That has made it tougher for developers to add features in response to customers' business requirements in what has become an increasingly "alert-driven, workflow-based world," says Martin Malley, assistant vice president of information systems at Union Pacific Railroad.įor example, because of slowing sales in the automotive industry, Union Pacific executives wanted the ability to commingle vehicles from different manufacturers on a single railcar, says Malley.
#Netcontrol 4ru1t1a code#
According to industry experts, it was a pioneering system when first introduced, and it made the Omaha-based transportation giant one of the first companies in the world to make extensive use of online transaction processing technologies.īut while Union Pacific has been able to build on the system's 11 million lines of macro assembler code and make functional modifications to it over the years, the technology has grown obsolete, according to company executives. At the heart of Union Pacific Corp.'s railroad operations is an IBM mainframe-based transportation control system that's been chugging along like a hardworking locomotive for nearly 40 years.
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