North American Railroad realizes cost savings and identifies new revenue stream with Enterprise Architecture

Challenges

  • Modernize technologies and align business strategies to IT
  • Identify a tool that could support technology decision-making and enhance enterprise architecture frameworks
  • Integrate with ServiceNow and other technologies

Results

  • Standardized data and a clear understanding of IT inventory
  • Knowledge of where/how to prioritize and modernize systems
  • Ability to tap into the potential revenue stream of proprietary technology

Modernize and align IT to business strategies to realize transformation.

A $2.5B transportation holding company and one of the top 10 largest railroads in the US and Mexico had the vision to become the fastest-growing, best-performing, most customer-focused transportation provider in North America. To realize this, the Company needed to enhance coordination, simplify integration, build a consistent infrastructure, and create greater efficiencies in developing technology solutions that align with the business strategies with IT.

To realize its digital transformation objectives, the Company initiated a competitive bid for a tool to enable and support technology investment decision-making and enhance internal enterprise architecture frameworks. The tool must integrate with several technologies, including ServiceNow, and enable modeling, architecture, and management of enterprise architecture functions.

The Company looked at the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture tools to identify a short list of vendors with these capabilities. MEGA developed a Proof of Concept (PoC) that allowed the Company to test and validate its use cases with accurate data. This ability to work within a test environment and MEGA's responsive communication led the Company to select MEGA's HOPEX tool for the project.

 

A collaborative approach to Application Portfolio Management and Rationalization

The MEGA team discussed best practices and co-developed objectives, approaches, and timelines to kick the project off. As an output of this initial workshop, a 3-phased method was developed to help the Company meet its goals to manage and rationalize its application portfolio:

  • Phase I: Build asset inventory, begin to evaluate each asset, and test multiple transformation scenarios
  • Phase II: Identify and assess transformation drivers through a strategic SWOT (Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/ Threats) analysis and define the vision, objectives, and new capabilities; develop target IT architecture of services, applications, and infrastructure
  • Phase III: Business and IT work together to review and refine business capability planning more broadly across channels and products, create strategic architectures, blueprints, and standards

During this process, MEGA provided consulting services to help the Company document its enterprise architecture, enabling them to identify technologies to continue utilizing, upgrading, or converting. This inventory allowed the Company to see a clear landscape of its IT and discover how it could use this technology to modernize its Management Control System (MCS) system, an important technology that the Company built that manages its logistics.

A clear picture of IT assets to make smarter, faster decisions

With the knowledge gained from this IT Portfolio Management project, this Company is now able to:

  • Make better, more informed decisions based on standardized data and a clear understanding of their IT inventory. HOPEX's central application repository provided instant visibility of their technology footprint, saving time, resources, and money by avoiding the costly move of old end-of-life applications to a new data center. Further, the Company can organize and find information faster, connect processes, and discover new concepts.
  • Modernize their systems by reviewing logistics, manufacturing, and customer processes and understanding what aspects could benefit from new technologies.
  • Enable cost efficiencies by utilizing managers to own and manage specific portfolios to review costs and depreciations and identify efficiencies using standardized requirements, documentation, and Key Performance Indicators.
  • Identify new revenue opportunities for their MCS product whereby they can now document use cases and manage supporting technologies that enable the Company to potentially resell this code to other railway companies to manage their logistics.

Solutions

  • HOPEX IT Architecture
  • HOPEX IT Portfolio Management
  • HOPEX platform
  • MEGA Services Team
North American Railroad realizes cost savings

Headquarter
North America

Industry

Transportation & Travel Services

Product

Enterprise Architecture

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