Attachmate helps Freightliner to become a true 21st century logistics company
Freightliner retains biggest customer with Attachmate Verastream solution

Formerly part of British Rail, Freightliner limited was formed in 1997 as a private company following a management buyout. Today, it is Britain’s largest Intermodal freight operator via rail and road, transporting over one million containers per year. Operating in four deep-sea shipping ports -including Southampton and Felixstowe - as well as 15 inland locations, it manages and tracks deliveries from its fleet of 130+ trains and 300 trucks.

Traditionally, information on the status of its customers’ containers was held on Freightliner’s mainframe computers and accessed manually. This data would be relayed by phone, fax or email to the customer. This process was often slow and prone to error, which did not support Freightliners’ vision of becoming a modern 21st Century logistics company. The company was also coming under increasing pressure from its customer base to provide real-time access to shipping information.

The crunch point occurred when Freightliner’s largest customer - accounting for 30% of their business at that time - demanded real-time shipping information delivered electronically. Due to a global system change in the organisation, this customer needed the information sent to them in the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) format that is standard in the transport and logistics industry. Freightliner faced losing the business if it did not make these changes within six months.

The major criteria for the solution was simple, it needed to be delivered: quickly and within a strict timeframe; to a reasonable budget; and reliably, as the system generates up to two million messages a year. In addition, Freightliners’ containers are tracked using a 3270 mainframe host application called  ‘ERIC’: a competitor of Freightliner uses the same host and a similar application so the solution had to be non-intrusive, not just for financial/technical reasons but also for the business reason of not tipping off the competitor.

New Mainframe, New People, New Technology?

Freightliner considered three initial solutions to the problem:

1. Rip and Replace: Make changes to the existing legacy system
2. Increase manual headcount: Provide additional human resources to ensure that the work could be carried out using paper and Excel spreadsheets
3. Host integration technology. 

The option to change the mainframe or update was quickly ruled out on the grounds that the procedure would be technically difficult, very costly and very unlikely to be completed within the six month timeframe. The second option of taking on additional staff was also rejected due to the fact that Freightliner is a 24/7 operation and therefore this approach would create huge resource implications.  As the company grew, it would therefore need to assign more and more resources so this was never going to prove a long-term solution.

The third option, chosen by Freightliner’s IT and business taskforce, used host integration software. This allowed the company to pick up information from the mainframe, download and format it into EDI messages and send to Freightliners’ customers.  Freightliner’s customers could then simply and conveniently put this information into their own information systems.  This solution was not only non-intrusive but also the most cost-effective and least time-consuming process.

Colin Thompson, group IT director for Freightliner, explains: “In selecting Attachmate Verastream, we evaluated a number of offerings including NetManage. We chose Verastream because it was the most suitable technology for real-time, customer-focused applications in environments with host systems, and it delivers rapid results without risk to existing operations. A communication mechanism on this scale that offers EDI opportunities enables us to enhance our relationships with our customers and further our commitment to delivering service excellence.”

From proof of concept to full implementation within just six weeks

At the beginning of the implementation, Attachmate provided Freightliner with a proof of concept within just one week. This was a working model which demonstrated - from beginning to end - the EDI message delivery service and how the process works. Thompson remembers this as giving them “a lot of confidence that the solution would be workable within our existing environment and produce the results that we required.”

Following the deployment of Verastream, Freightliner’s customer could subscribe to an EDI-based notification service providing state changes of their container - for example, arrival or departure from the port or terminal. To get a complete overview of these state changes, Verastream scans the mainframe every quarter of an hour, generating an activity report every 20 minutes during the day and every hour at night. This is a fully automatic process that leverages information contained on the legacy host systems and enabled Freightliner to redefine its business processes.

As Joanne Turner, general manager for commercial activities at Freightliner comments, “We were delighted that we were able to deliver a solution within only six weeks of having received the technical specification from the customer. The roll out process went extremely well and the customer was more than happy that we were able to react within such a short space of time and particularly in the knowledge that we were maintaining our old mainframe system.”

From the one to the many

The immediate advantage of delivering the solution within the pre-determined time frame was that Freightliner met the needs of its largest customer and retained the business. However, there were other benefits that Freightliner gained by implementing Verastream.

Firstly, it allowed them to add greater value to other clients’ contracts by providing the same real-time reporting functionality to all of its customers “With Attachmate’s consultancy, Freightliner has since rolled out its real-time reporting on container shipments to all of its customers. It has quickly and cost effectively enhanced our level of service to all of our customers,” said Thompson.

There have also been HR benefits. Removing the need to manually process information has freed up a huge amount of internal resources. As Turner explains, “The project has been rolled out successfully to many other customers and it has improved our ability to accept more business from them because no-one is wasting time chasing information - it’s given to them electronically, allowing all of us to be much more productive. Being able to do this at a relatively small additional investment has made it a really high value for money product in our view.”

Meeting changing industry demands

Attachmate’s service-orientated architecture approach not only allowed the solution to be delivered within a very short period of time, but also offered the flexibility to be adapted as further challenges arise. Since 9/11, the industry has seen increased security demands, requiring freight operators to capture seal numbers on containers so that they cannot be tampered with unnoticed. Freightliner’s system was easily adapted so that this information could be recorded and stored.

The system has proved to be remarkably resilient to the changing demands and requests made upon it: indeed, the Attachmate solution has come to be known internally at Freightliner as “their most reliable employee,” according to Thompson.

This manageable and adaptable system has given Freightliner the confidence to meet customer demands that previously would have caused major concerns. As Joanne Turner explains  “Since having the Attachmate product in place we have gained more confidence commercially in our development of IT, certainly I now feel much more confident in conversations with customers that any demands they may come up with we have every chance of achieving them. “