Enterprise
Application Integration (EAI) Services:
The Heart
of Our Application Environment
The
following is an excerpt from the Canadian Pacific Railway “Company Line”
newsletter. It describes the EAI
project managed by Ken Wiens (KGW Consultants Ltd)
"… The
implementation team faced the additional challenge of learning and applying the
new technology and processes while concurrently supporting and developing in
our legacy environment. The team encountered a few surprises and many long days
but their perseverance and dedication resulted in an absolutely successful
implementation. CPR is now positioned to leverage considerable business value
from this new technology."
- Rob Cardwell, CPR Information Services, Manager of E-Bus Infrastructure.
Where It All Began
The use of Electronic
Data Interchange (EDI) at CPR to exchange data with our customers and business
partners is growing at an accelerated pace. EDI is the use of strict data and
transaction standards - a sort of common language -- that enables companies and
business systems to seamlessly exchange business information. CPR uses EDI
extensively to exchange information with other railroads (ETA's), our customers
(waybills), inter-modal partners, suppliers (PO's), and with regulatory and
government agencies. This growth also means our costs for EDI usage and support
have increased substantially. In fact there are currently 110, 000 transactions
per day that occur over CPR systems. In 2002, IS expects to spend $4 to $5M for
EDI usage.
Two years ago, the opportunity to reduce our EDI costs by in-sourcing our EDI
processing was identified. At that time, CPR was using two separate platforms
to process our EDI; both managed by separate 3rd parties. The facility
management fees paid to these 3rd party venders amounted to about $1.3M/year
Clearly this was an area that could be brought in-house to save dollars and
create business efficiency.
And then came A2A…
At the same time the
Internet Shipping Instructions (ISI) Project was getting started and a need for
messaging between applications or 'A2A messaging' was identified. We believed
significant benefits could be obtained through a single messaging engine for
A2A and B2B transactions
" EAI is an acronym for Enterprise Application Integration. EAI technology
allows the enterprise to integrate applications and data both internal and
external to the organization. EDI is
only one aspect of integration. EAI is
much larger and incorporates a growing breadth of integration requirements and
business process demands" says Ken Wiens, Project Manager, EAI. CPR needed
a central hub or single tool to operate all of its required integration
demands.
First Steps
The
project team developed a RFI (request for information), which was sent to the
market place, and seven vendors replied. Then background 'homework' began which
included reviews of what the other Class 1 railways were doing and solicitation
of the expertise of IT industry experts, Meta and Gartner Groups, for their
criteria. The group was then short listed to three vendors and the team carried
out a very detailed evaluation of the proposals sent by the top three vendors.
The vendors were invited to demo their solutions and were also given
assignments and technical problems to solve. The evaluation included a grid
scale with 400 items that each vendor's product was tested, scaled and compared
against. "The technical evaluation was very detailed, but we felt
confident that we had completed due diligence in our assessment and that the
EAI Technology from Mercator was the best choice," says Brian Schultz,
Team Leader of EAI Services
Ken Wiens comments, "It is also important to note here that the business
case that drove bringing in the Mercator Tools was bringing EDI processing
in-house. It was clear throughout though, that the future added value would
come from new A2A integration capabilities. The team needed to select a tool
that would work for both."
Successes!
The major applications using the technology so far are TYES, ESI and
VIN. "EAI technology becomes the hub or heart of CPR's application to
application (A2A) transaction processing and we currently have a very healthy
and strong heart beat," says Rob Cardwell. Other features and benefits
resulting from the EAI project include:
1) Creative Thinking. The complexity drove some very creative thinking by the
team to minimize risk to operations and ensure the EDI migration process would
have minimal impact to the user. "Our goal was to minimize rework by the
application teams and we were 95% successful," remarks Brian Schultz.
2) Full Functionality. Plus, the team added a lot of new functionality, all
with little impact to users.
3) Improved Security. Communications protocols that support EDI processing were
moved behind the firewall.
4) New Web Tool. A better Tool for applications to trouble shoot their
transactions.
5) First Major Railway. CPR is the first major Class I railway to implement the
EAI processes. Currently, other railways have been carrying out
benchmarking studies with CPR.
6) Largest EAI Project Ever Completed. Software vendors and consultants are
citing CPR as the largest EAI project ever implemented in North America.
The EAI Team is expecting to be processing five times the current load of
transactions (five X 110,000 per day) in the next six months and the team is
confident the new technology can handle the increase.
Future Benefits
As part of the
project, CPR conducted a joint research and development exercise with Shell
Canada's Research Team. A team from Shell and CPR made up of both business and
IT professionals convened to investigate sending and receiving XML (extensible
mark-up language) over the Internet. The group has been meeting to identify and
resolve business and technical issues that must be addressed to securely use this
new technology in this manner. Definitely there is a tangible business benefit
to both Shell and CPR plus reduction in VAN costs is certainly one benefit.
"We had been trying to find someone who wanted to do this with us. We
presented to Shell's VP of e-business. They had been looking for a partner as
well, to explore the technology. This has high status at Shell as they have a
business opportunity to explore this further and have actual implementation
plans," comments Ken Wiens.
The joint research team would be looking at working in the 'sulphur world' and
the scope also involves a heavy-oil upgrader at Shell. "The benefits would
be that this could potentially create some added business for CPR with Shell
Canada and tie us closer to a major business partner because the technology
would tie our systems together. We knew this project would position us for the
future. Here is some tangible action happening from what we knew conceptually.
We could potentially increase business value significantly to CPR as a result
of our IT activities, " elaborates Ken