Even perception of failure was a threat to the field staff's fragile faith in the project. "We'd laid the groundwork here and in the field that this was the wave of the future," Kucinski says. "If the system experienced any prolonged failure at any point, that would have been shot. The perception would have been that we just can't automate this."

Mending an IT Disconnect

Despite the cautious pace and sagacious involvement of the users, Con-Way Transportation committed a classic business-IT alignment fauxpas. Du did the technical design and coding of the optimization model on his own, then, in his words, "I gave it to the IT department and said, 'This is it. You have to figure out everything else."

"Everything else" meant integrating Du's optimization model with the rest of the line-haul automation components, including an existing load-plan application and OracleOracle database, plus developing new interfaces, providing maintenance and leading subsequent rollouts. The handoff to the 150- person, Portland, Ore.-based IT group was far from the ideal for Jacquelyn Barretta, Con-Way Transportation's vice president of information services. "We had a lot of concern around that. YaFeng is very talented, and not many people have the same abilities he does. So we would have preferred to start working on this earlier to make sure we understood the model," Barretta says. She notes that there's still a lack of documentation, and the model didn't adhere to IT's coding standards, making it tougher to support. There's also the risk that a change to the applications that capture and transmit shipment orders, among others, could have an unanticipated impact on Du's model. All the more reason to gain a full understanding of its nature and code. Alles zu Oracle auf CIO.de

Toward this end, Barretta recently dedicated a staff member to become an expert in the optimization model, and sent the person to classes to gain a better understanding of the disciplines behind it and what makes it tick. In the meantime, IT staffers still see the optimization model as a hands-off "black box" and call on Du to diagnose and fix problems via remote access to their servers.

In spite of those concerns, the four IT staff members dedicated to deploying and maintaining the line-haul automation system have forged ahead. In March 2002, Line-haul Automation Project Coordinator Scott Van Winkle's team deployed a Web interface that for the first time lets dispatchers view the line-haul plan onscreen rather than in stacks of printouts. And they've been spearheading the line-haul automation's rollout in Con-Way Western Express, due for completion in December 2002, using a dispatcher from Central as an ambassador to smooth user acceptance. And this time there is no grueling extraction of business rules. The Western dispatchers were given parameters and a business logic table, and they were told to fill in the blanks.