A well-known freight railroad network in North America lacked visibility into business operations and safety scenarios. It was grappling with steep costs owing to software licensing and multi-vendor dependency. The inability to break organizational silos and induce knowledge management in the prevailing work culture also proved problematic.

HCLTech engineered a digital technology platform to streamline business processes and improve visibility into operations, simultaneously bolstering the safety and customer experience. The objective was to ensure consistent user experience and deploy open-source technologies to minimize vendor lock-ins.

To allow legacy and digital systems to co-exist, HCLTech developed a customized legacy modernization and integration framework. We adopted proven and established industry standards to facilitate an end-to-end tech strategy. By deploying SOA and complex event processing, we embraced a platform-based development approach. Factoring in the customer’s environment, we also recommended a DevOps maturity model to dissolve organizational silos.

For the railway major, these steps yielded multiple benefits:

• Ensured that digital technology platforms are relevant for years to come
• Laid the foundation for a competitive and functionally advanced transportation system
• Reduced costs significantly by shifting to heavy mainframe and minimized operational risks.
• Enabled process improvement KPIs to realize and generate a better return on investment with the complex event processing architecture and the DevOps maturity model.

To learn more, read the detailed case study.