Canadian Pacific Railway Uses Business Objects to Improve Asset Utilization - e-business solutions information - Brief Article

Information Superhighways Newsletter, June, 2001

Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) is a company that lives by the clock. Timetables, shipment, and customer satisfaction are all tied to Father Time. Now, with Business Objects, a provider of e-business intelligence (e-BI) solutions, CPR can better analyze the utilization of more than 80,000 railcars to meet service the delivery standard it sets by customers.

It also tracks shipments to customers against delivery commitments to identify opportunities to improve service. Shipment performance metrics resulting from this analysis are shared with customers. CPR's shipment performance standards are better than equivalent to any class-one railroad (the largest railroads in North America), and the company is leveraging Business Objects to improve even further.

The ease of reporting and analytical capabilities available in Business Objects allow experts in the freight car management and field operations to look at overall patterns in railcar movement and to quickly drill down into opportunity areas. CPR looks at asset velocity and the timeliness of connections in its major railyards as key indicators of performance. Business Objects allows CPR to quickly select a particular railyard, or a subset of railcars, for more detailed analysis. At the most detailed level, CPR's experts can see each movement an individual railcar made while traveling from origin to destination. Currently, more than 400 CPR employees use Business Objects and generate nearly 1,000 reports daily using the solution.