IT: "deep, rather than broad"

Railway Age, August, 2004

"We've integrated our solutions and applications in the foundation, rather than just adding features."

YOU CAN BOIL DOWN CN's IT philosophy to one basic idea: solutions, not complications. "We adhere to a couple of basic principles," says Fred Grigsby, senior vice president and chief information officer. "We've integrated our solutions and applications into the foundation, rather than just adding features. It makes us deep, rather than broad."

By the end of April, 16,000 CN customers were making use of e-commerce to conduct business. That number continues to rise, spurred partially by the company's ability to get many customers to stick a toe into the electronic waters during the month-long strike early this year.

With CN's Service Reliability System (SRS) platform, every car has an electronic trip plan, every trip plan fits into a train plan, and every train plan fits into a traffic management plan that minimizes yarding and connections. There are alarm bells to warn of any deviation from the plans and provide for swift corrective action that ensures maximum compliance.

One of the most effective arrows in CN's electronic quiver today is DataCity. Every midnight, DataCity begins processing about 1.5 million daily events that were tracked the previous day. These include such things as car and train movements, equipment and crew cycling, billing, pricing, bad orders, and train delays. All are recorded, scanned, or called in as CN employees across the system go about their work. By 6:30 a.m. EST, DataCity has cleaned and transferred this information to its multi-dimensional structures. Detail, summary, and aggregate reports are loaded and available to more than 2,000 CN intranet users.

DataCity's great strength is its drill-down capability to current and historical information. Grigsby explains, "If we have operational questions about specific cars, consists, or trains, we can drill down by geography, customer, or time to take a hard look at what actually happened. If we have a trip plan failure for a specific car, we can drill down very quickly to find out why. If we're trying to improve trip plan performance, we may find a route where we're consistently bettering our schedule and service guarantee. Additional information from DataCity may then reveal we can establish a connection with an earlier train to get that traffic to its destination 48 hours earlier."