Still, because the Western region's destinations are more spread out than Central's, the program needed some tweaks. Again, there was pressure from dispatchers to make changes to suit their individual preferences. Even Central was still trying to slip in more modifications. Barretta quickly learned to subject change requests to careful, structured review, requiring documentation of the request and review, and prioritization of the proposed change by line-haul managers in all three regions. Overall, ongoing maintenance on the system should average $100,000 per year.

Another IT responsibility is making sure the mission-critical application never fails. MQSeries performance monitors scan for certain threshold numbers that could indicate trouble in the order pipeline. When a threshold is reached, IT staff pagers start clamoring. A crash in the IBMIBM Web Sphere server that powers the system will cause an automatic failover to the server used for development. About 105,000 shipment orders move through the system each day, with a spike in the late afternoon. The architecture, based on J2EE, is built to accommodate volume spikes and overall business growth. Alles zu IBM auf CIO.de

Plans call for building optimization bridges across the company. Once line-haul automation is running in all four Con-Way operating regions, each will have visibility into the others, making it possible to, say, take an available truck and driver from Southern and press them into service for Central. The coding is already complete for this capability and other enhancements, such as adding weather conditions into the routing plan, and simulating what happens if Con-Way adds new terminals, for example.

Faith in Long-Term Strategy

Looking back over seven years to the inception of the line-haul project, Du sees the trust that Stotlar and Con-Way CEO Gerald Detter had in the project as its most critical success factor. "At certain times, things didn't look that rosy, but they never lost confidence," Du says. "They told me it didn't matter how slow it was, just keep working on it. So many people put their trust in me; that was my motive not to fail."

It helped that enough incremental progress was being made to indicate a probability of success, adds Stotlar. But another reason for Con-Way's faith was that it wasn't letting short-term ROIROI rule the day. In fact, Stotlar doesn't hesitate to answer "absolutely" when asked if Con-Way would green-light such a protracted initiative in today's lean times, when many companies won't invest in anything that doesn't promise a six-month payoff. "We understood the strategic value of this, we were comfortable with that, and we didn't get blinded by ROI," he says. "If you manage purely from an ROI perspective, you might have given up on this one early on. And that would have been a mistake." Alles zu ROI auf CIO.de