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Technology on Time

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DQI Bureau
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Global logistics giant FedEx collects and delivers nearly five million

shipments in over 211 countries every business day. And to do that, its

information resources must remain up at all times and is available and

accessible to all its employees, partners and customers on demand. Managing

operations of this scale and dynamism requires sophisticated IT applications.

FedEx has been working with Mphasis-BFL for services ranging from testing and

development to the architectural consultancy. In an on-going engagement spanning

several years, Mphasis-BFL has progressed from being a vendor to be a critical

business partner of FedEx.

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FedEx

has five group companies comprising of FedEx Express, FedEx Ground, FedEx

Freight, FedEx Custom Critical and FedEx Trade Networks deliver nearly 5 million

shipments in over 211 countries every business day. With more than 215,000

employees and contractors, FedEx operates world’s second largest airlines and

over 35,000 trucks. FedEx invests nearly US $1.5 billion each year in

maintaining and upgrading its information technology resources.

MphasiS BFL is a leading provider of software and system integration

technology, has over 1,250 software developers and architects across 17 offices

and 11 development centers worldwide. MphasiS is headquartered in Bangalore,

India and Santa Monica, in the US.

In 1994, Mphasis-BFL was offered a small performance tuning assignment by

FedEx Corporate Services Inc, the arm that provides corporate services to FedEx

Group companies. The job required five software professionals and just five

months to finish. These engineers combed through thousands of lines of code, a

slightly cumbersome task due to lack of adequate documentation of the system.

Yet, Mphasis-BFL team managed to finish the job in time. FedEx then appointed

Mphasis-BFL for its documentation. It took a 45-member Mphasis-BFL team, a

little over five months to finish the painstaking job of running through the

600,000 lines of Tandem and COBOL code of one of FedEx’s most critical systems

that manages core logistics applications such as order processing, inventory

accounting, reporting and EDI. The net result was FedEx offering Mphasis-BFL the

Master Business Agreement, which paved way for a long-term relationship. This

was a watershed for Mphasis-BFL and formed a basis for many successful projects

it partnered with FedEx.

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From TANDEM to TIBCO



Today, the services provided by Mphasis-BFL range from architectural

consulting, to full life-cycle development, reengineering and continuation

engineering, support and maintenance, testing and quality consulting. Over 500

person years of efforts have been already put in managing technologies ranging

from Tandem-based legacy systems to Tibco for Enterprise Application

Integration.

Taking

advantage of the time-gap between the US and India, Mphasis BFL

could now work on FedEx’s projects–real-time, round-the-clock

Realizing the importance of relationship, scope and the criticality of work

being carried out for FedEx Mphasis-BFL set-up a dedicated center "FedEx

India Extension" in September 1996. A 128 Kbps Dedicated link was

established between FedEx, Memphis and FedEx India Extension at MphasiS,

Bangalore, India. This enabled the company to adopt a collaborative

offshore-onsite model of delivery at optimal costs and assured quality. Taking

the advantage of time-gap between USA and India, Mphasis-BFL could always work

on FedEx’s projects round-the-clock.

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As the scope of work increased, MphasiS established a 64K backup link.

Managed jointly by FedEx and MphasiS, these links have helped MphasiS access

FedEx Servers directly with little or no interrupts and have also minimized

costs of creating parallel development/maintenance infra-structure at the FedEx

India Extension. Using tele-conferencing and instant messengers, the projects

are regularly reviewed for the progress.

Modifying the parcel tracking number



When FedEx started its operations, it adopted a 9-digit tracking number for

its parcels. Due to the explosive growth in FedEx’s business, it had to adopt

a more accommodating 16 digit tracking number. In this assignment, the problem

was not so much in the operational change management of the 16-digit tracking

number, or even in the scanning of hundreds of thousands of lines across the

various systems and making appropriate changes in an heterogeneous environment,

but in ensuring that each and every system that ever makes a reference to this

number is suitably upgraded. Even if one glitch showed up during the actual

go-live process, then it would simply crash all FedEx systems. The loss and the

resultant chaos were, simply unimaginable.

"It was a tremendous technological and coordination challenge."

reminisces B S Srinivas Rao, associate general manager at Mphasis-BFL and the

then project leader. "We had to first identify what systems needed change,

test them and then ensure that the entire system was operationally in sync and

viable." Concurs S Suresh Babu, associate general manager at Mphasis-BFL,

"We developed a process handbook to ensure that the upgrade happens in a

systematic manner."

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‘We

felt that if we were now saving costs, then FedEx should also

benefit. It was only fair that savings were passed back to the

customer...’

When Y2K bug threatened…



In September 1997, Mphasis-BFL developed a white paper for sorting out the

Year 2000 problem at FedEx. The familiarity with FedEx systems was one of the

prime factors that swung this project in Mphasis-BFL’s favor. Due to some

internal delays, Mphasis-BFL could get the order only by last quarter of 1998,

which meant that the team had very little time to waste. By December itself,

Mphasis-BFL managed to check the integration of systems and their Y2K

suitability. The project was over within six months, way ahead of schedule.

Says Uma Mohan, general manager at Mphasis-BFL. "Part of the reason for

this speed is Mphasis-BFL’s ability to ramp up and scale down teams as

required. Typically, it takes just a month to ramp up and about two to scale

down. For the Y2K project, Mphasis-BFL mobilized a large team in a short span of

time to ensure the timely completion of the project." During the Y2K

project, Mphasis-BFL developed several tools that helped speed up the project

delivery. And due to these automated tools and Mphasis-BFL’s familiarity with

FedEx’s systems the project cycle time collapsed resulting in enormous cost

savings, running to more than a million dollars. These savings were transferred

back to FedEx. Says Uma Mohan, "For us, this wasn’t a just a project but

a continuation of a partnership. If we managed to save costs, then FedEx should

also benefit. It was only fair that the savings are passed back to the

customer."

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Powering the Powership Suite



In order to reduce the tracking-check traffic on its servers and provide its

large customers a multi-carrier electronic shipping system, FedEx designed a

suite of applications called the Powership Suite (now called as FedEx Ship

Manager). These applications not only enable the customers to track their

consignments but also check the latest rates for different routes, generate

tracking numbers, barcodes and address labels. All this is done without

accessing the FedEx servers directly.

Initially, Mphasis-BFL provided extensive testing services that greatly

reduced bug density. Nearly 16,000 possible scenarios were created and two

million transactions were generated and tested. Almost 1600 bugs were reported

on both new as well mature products. "As a result of our understanding of

these products gained through testing activities, FedEx offered us to develop a

few products from the suite of Powership," says Uma Mohan.

Making promises, and delivering



The second half of 1999 and the whole of 2000 saw a major leap forward in

Mphasis-BFL’s engagement with Fedex. During this year, Mphasis-BFL worked on a

variety of projects in the areas of supply chain integration, FedEx’s web

initiatives, and also in architectural consulting. Having worked on the legacy

messaging backbone for FedEx, MphasiS was invited in the re-design and

development of the Messaging backbone on newer technologies. The new system had

a completely revamped message processing backbone that was scalable, flexible

and extremely robust. This backbone had to support both EDI and other messaging

protocols as the backbone was expected to serve as a bridge between FedEx and

its partners. It had a built-in workflow, a translation and transformation

process for various messaging protocols and an email management service. MphasiS

has been involved in the design and development of the new system, which used an

entire array of cutting-edge web technologies including JSP, EJB, Weblogic,

TopLink in a Oracle 8 and Unix platform. Of all systems that Mphasis-BFL worked

on at Fedex, the assignment of developing and maintaining several engines of

CHRONOS system, proved to be toughest and also, the most fulfilling.

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Says Srinivas Rao, "CHRONOS modules also referred to engines, have some

of the most complicated logic built-in, and designed to run the core revenue

management functions at Fedex." At Fedex, just as the executives keep track

of the consignments, they also keep track of revenue through a concept called

"Revenue-Band." Simply put, revenue-band helps FedEx to identify the

amount of revenue expected on a minute-to-minute basis. Among the many engines,

CDV engine was the first project that was completely outsourced. And PDV engine

was the first offshore project for CHRONOS by any vendor. Mphasis-BFL’s

on-site/offshore model was put to use and over 500 person months worth of effort

in technologies such as C++, Java, Tuxedo, Sybase and Unix saw successful

completion of the projects.

Integrating supply chain solutions



As a complete logistics company, one of the most important parts of FedEx’s

business is help its customers solve their supply chain problems. FedEx provides

fifth-party logistics support to a number of its customers. Its logistics

solutions are designed to help customers cut costs, reduce inventory overhead,

and minimize product obsolescence. It also offers increased product visibility

across the entire supply chain with useful management reports to help improve

the process. Mphasis-BFL had to extensively work with FedEx’s Supply chain and

logistics systems and integrate these applications with several third-party

solutions. Given the functionality required, the disparate systems that must

work seamlessly and deliver this functionality involved in integrating other

pieces, this project was a huge challenge.

Binding it all together



Given the number of intricate work processes, customer interaction systems,

holding the information together at FedEx required an extremely higher order of

an integration plan. Due to varying standards in messaging, legacy systems built

on TANDEM/COBOL platforms, off-the-shelf third-party software and web

technologies, integrating them into a seamless information pool required

tremendous skills and understanding of business processes. In an effort to move

up the value-chain, Mphasis-BFL is concentrating on providing architectural

consulting, development, testing and quality consulting.

Forward thinking



Recently, Mphasis-BFL provided a proof of concept (PoC) to FedEx on how it

can integrate disparate systems using various enterprise application integration

solutions. Technologies such as EJB, CORBA, Java, C++ have been interspersed

with middleware such as TIBCO Message Broker, MQ Series, Tuxedo and integrating

partners through Web Methods. "The aim was to showcase the advantages of

using these technologies across the enterprise in conjunction with their

existing systems and thereby bring to light the understanding that MphasiS has

of FedEx systems as well as our architectural capabilities," says Uma

Mohan. The idea was to test different architectures and technologies in FedEx’s

context with a view of future requirements. MphasiS is also providing

architectural consulting to a few key projects within FedEx and it hopes to

start contributing significantly in the areas of Partner Integration (PI)

systems, CRM solutions and even knowledge management.

TEAM DQ

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