PROJECT: Enterprise-Wide Rail Management Solution

Contract Scope:
To develop an enterprise-wide solution that monitors all inbound shipments, manages rail fleets and provides inbound inventory visibility for all of Proctor and Gamble’s (P&G) North American operations.

Project Description:
The project spanned multiple functional areas including but not limited to all P&G business units, corporate information
technology, plant personal and other corporate traffic functions.

Goals of the Project:
The goals of the project were to provide the following:
- Total visibility of all rail shipments throughout the P&G enterprise
- Single source of consolidated information
- Visibility of all maintenance, repair & lease contract information in one application
- Ability to minimize excess inventory at plant locations
- Ability to update and edit car master information
- Ability to create and download ad hoc reports through web enabled report generator
- Allow secure user entry for P&G specific information

Task Summary:
In early 1999, P&G awarded IntelliTrans a total rail management solution project. The intent was for P&G to replace an existing in-house application. With over 8,000 private cars, P&G is one of the largest private fleet owners in North America.

IntelliTrans worked for several months with P&G to develop thousands of business rules that were unique to P&G’s environment of thousands of Origin/Destination pairs and a myriad of different product mixes and shipping conditions. This effort involved integration with hundreds of P&G suppliers, all P&G plants, third party rail switchers, multiple P&G legacy systems, repair shops, leasing companies, all major North American railroads and many other supply-chain participants.

IntelliTrans also was required to meet the individual requirements of over 800 users. This proved very challenging since many of the users are located in geographically diverse locals. Much of the testing was conducted in large groups via the Internet. P&G went through an extensive and exhaustive testing process that included at least 10 full-time individuals for over six months. P&G would not have rolled-out the system to the user community until the data was 100% compliant with P&G’s requirements.

The application is geared to not only give P&G information about its business to internal users, but to also give supply-chain participants such as raw material suppliers and carriers visibility of shipment activities and new orders.

Project Outcome:
The project was and still is very successful. Currently, there are over 300 concurrent users of the application at peak times. P&G uses data from the system for today for rail freight and repair shop vendor negotiations as well as validation for product receipt and replenishment orders to its suppliers.

P&G has gone from having daily data updates to real time information. The increase of information availability has
identified and highlighted further opportunities to increase efficiency within P&G legacy systems.

 

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