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The BNSF Railroad
is the product of a long and rich legacy that spans over 150 years of
pioneering developments, efficient operations, and innovative thinking. From
east to west and from north to south, BNSF delivers the products that
people and businesses the nation over use every day: coal, automotive,
grain, industrial products, electronics, and paper products - to name
but a few.
The company is the product of two different but complimentary parent companies:
- Burlington Northern Railroad - with over 330 predecessor companies, BN stretched from the Great Lakes in the north east, south west into Texas, and west as far as the Pacific ocean.
- Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway - from its heartland hub in Kansas , ATSF built itself into a thriving operation in the Great Lakes, Gulf of Mexico, and California Pacific Coast triangle.
In late 2005, the BN and ATSF railroad companies merged and FitzSoft Consulting was there through it all.
FitzSoft Consulting was instrumental in developing processes and procedures for synchronizing reporting between the train operating systems of the two companies and for implementing the combined company's adopted system in a series of two week long cut over periods across the former BN territory.
Railroad operations are 24/7 and so is their IT support rotation. FitzSoft Consulting's expertise in dealing directly with clients, talking their language, understanding their core business needs, and translating it into software was vital to the success of numerous projects at the company and to its clients:
- Freight Haulers
- Developed a system that permitted clients to get real-time snapshots
of the location and status of their shipments on the BNSF and the current
estimate of their monthly demurrage bill. It also allowed them to approve
or dispute the charges at the individual railcar level.
- Interchange Carriers
- Automated the reporting of interchange equipment between railroads thereby limiting clerical involvement to the correction of errors in the automated process and allowing equipment in the field to be dispatched more quickly.
With the merger successfully behind them and an eye on the future, a core group of BNSF employees developed the Xpress™ web enablement API and set about leveraging their mainframe business logic to deploy the train operating system to the browser environment. FitzSoft Consulting was back and centrally involved in wrapping the API around core railroad operating applications. With Xpress™, over 3000 green screen transactions could be rapidy grouped into fewer than 100 customizable and easily navigable browser applications.
