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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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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."
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.
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.