Business Objective
Our client is an American class II railroad company providing rail and logistics solutions to domestics, international intermodal, and carload customers. The client has strategic partnerships with some of the ports and motor carriers enabling them to move freight safely, efficiently, and reliably.
In order to reduce the turnaround time for the bid pricing mechanism, the client was looking to automate the legacy pricing platform as well as automate the handling of customers, business, and market data. Besides, the client wanted to derive insights from important metrics over time.
Challenges
- Unstructured historical database
- Extracting data simultaneously from various sources (both internal and external)
- Mapping various data sources without proper key elements
Solution Methodology
- Pulled existing customer, bids as well as fuel surcharge information from the SAS database using SAS call
- Pulled CRM data of existing, new customers, and market rates from CRM as well as websites using an API call
- Made DLL calls made to pull mileage data from the application
- Developed a pricing model which can be viewed through pricing sheets
- Provisioned visualization of the information through various charts and reports
Business Impact
- Provided a semi-automated solution for the legacy platform involving complex data handling
- Drastically reduced manual intervention and the turnaround time for the bid pricing process
