A leading oilfield services provider that partners with railroad companies to transport products across North America
Key Challenges
The company had to monitor the movement of rail cars, both loaded and empty, for logistics and inventory management. A third-party service provided the location information for each rail car at frequent intervals. The Enterprise Geographic Information System (EGIS) department of the company sought a web-based GIS application to track rail cars in real time.
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Benefits
Improve logistics and inventory management.
Each rail car that transports the company’s products is bar coded. The bar code system records details of rail cars arriving and exiting stations. The bar code system and transportation data was managed by a third party. Infosys developed a solution that geo-coded the location of each rail car and displayed it on a map.
The Infosys application facilitates real-time traffic management by tracking specific rail cars as well as the entire fleet. Advanced search tools ensure easy retrieval of historical data and transportation logs. Our solution has intuitive features to improve the search functionality, and enable users to save and print freight records and location maps.
Search results can be exported to a Microsoft Excel worksheet, saved in a tabular format and printed as a map. We offered a map navigation toolbar with full extent, previous extent, next extent, zoom in, zoom out; and pan out buttons. Plotting geographic coordinates on a map displays details of rail cars at the location. The maps can also be saved and printed.
Infosys created the rail car tracking application by combining diverse mapping services and GIS technologies, including Esri ArcSDE, ArcGIS Online, Microsoft Virtual Earth, and ArcGIS Server API for Flex, and SAP.
The interactive rail car tracking application tracks rail cars based on the equipment number, fleet series, product transported, and destination. The system generates a 15-day event history for a rail car enquiry, which helps accelerate transportation planning.
GIS-based tracking of rail cars ensures smooth transportation of oil and gas products. Identification of bottlenecks in transit enables escalation and follow-up with railroad companies. Significantly, it improves logistics as well as inventory management.
