For more than three decades, it has been CCCi’s privilege and pleasure to help hundreds of clients achieve their business objectives through technology solutions. Here we present a small sample of our many client case studies; we encourage you to contact us to learn more about the breadth and depth of our success stories.

Holistic access to historical data and forecasted spending facilitates fast, objective, insightful long-term business decisions.

The Client

An operator of one of the largest rail networks in North America with nearly 32,000 route miles covering 28 states and two Canadian provinces.

The Client's Need

The railway plays a key role in connecting American consumers with the goods they need and desire — from clothing and grain to video games and cars. Although they have been around for more than 150 years, the company is focused on being progressive and an easy, relevant choice for shipping. To fulfill this commitment, however, they needed a way to make faster, more objective decisions based on a holistic picture of their organization. With only individual views of functional areas within the company, CCCI’s client opened themselves up to misaligned resources and investments. For example, the railway’s marketing department developed a budget forecast and year-long promotions plan to encourage the use of a rail line by electronics manufacturers to distribute their goods.  Meanwhile the engineering department had simultaneously earmarked capital investment dollars to refurbish the rail line, which will impact traffic flow. If marketing has insights into the lines that will be undergoing renovations, they can better spend their budgeted dollars and promote more appropriate rail lines.

There was a need for a business intelligence tool that would access and consolidate existing data across various functional departments including finance, engineering, operations and marketing.  The railway turned to CCCi, a technology solutions and staffing provider, and preferred vendor with multiple consultants already on-site.

The Solution CCCi Provided

Through its dedicated Business Intelligence (BI) solution, CCCi helps companies implement BI solutions that provide the information needed to form actionable objectives and make strategic decisions that improve overall corporate performance. CCCi has proven experience across a wide array of BI projects, which combined with SAS expertise and a strong proposal from CCCi, made them the perfect partner for this initiative.

To fulfill the client’s need, CCCi developed an interactive intranet application that graphically displayed a representation of its nearly 32,000-route mile network. End users could click on a piece of the rail network and get information that included:

• Physical characteristics such as the weight of the rail, the speed of the track, how many bridges or tunnels it coincided with and what facilities were available
  
  
• Financial measures such as revenue, costs, the historical maintenance capital investments, forecasted capital investments
  
  
• Operational measures such as the number of trains, the weight of the trains and the frequency of the operations of the line
  
  
• Strategic and competitive rankings such as the routes in miles, traffic density and network connections
  
  

The Web-based application was created by CCCi’s consultant within the parameters established by the railway using HTML and SAS — ironically after SAS said it couldn’t be done — through a CGI in a UNIX environment.

The Result the Client Achieved

The interactive Web-based map has helped with numerous rationalization efforts that included thousands of miles of tracks. The client credits the application and the information it contains for helping them to optimize $200M out of their capital plans the first year it was introduced as well as other significant intangible benefits including:

• Instantaneous access to historical data for identifying business and spending trends
  
  
• The opportunity to scrutinize system and division projects on low and high return lines and allocate dollars appropriately
  
  
• A ranking mechanism for capital planning
  
  
• A useful, visual representation of planned capital spending for the entire railway network