More Transportation All-Stars

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BNSF Railway

• Project lead: Jeffrey Campbell, vice president of technology services and CIO
• Technology focus: Convergence - VoIP

This Fort Worth, Texas, rail operator recently rolled out the first of what it expects to be many mission-critical voice applications. The Voice Train Reporting application, which runs on network servers, allows locomotive conductors to radio or use cell phones to report pickup and delivery of freight car shipments. The application converts those calls into data, which is then fed into BNSF's Transportation Support System. Employees and customers have near-real-time access, too. Previously, railroad crew would mark up paperwork orders throughout the day, submitting those to a data-entry clerk at the end of a shift. The new application uses speech-recognition and speaker-verification software from Nuance Communications, an interactive voice response system built on Intervoice's Omvia Voice Framework and customized interfaces. BNSF has invested approximately $1.5 million in these voice developments, and expects to realize a one-year ROI of 105% and a three-year ROI of 115%.

J.B. Hunt Transport

• Project lead: Heather Moore, business systems analyst
• Technology focus: Applications - remote imaging

Besides the multimillion-dollar Pace system, J.B. Hunt Transport has a notable project underway to automate the processing of shipping documents. Previously, drivers dropped off their documents at designated locations across the country from which couriers brought them to headquarters in Lowell, Ark. Scanning, indexing and storage involved 13 people and took seven to 10 days, says Heather Moore, business systems analyst at J.B. Hunt. Today, drivers send their documents digitally using Transflo scanning stations at hundreds of public truck stops and Transflo automatically indexes and stores them. Within 60 days of implementing the Transflo document management system from Pegasus TransTech, the company saw a 40% reduction in the staff needed to process the documents, Moore says. The project decreased unbilled revenue by 50%, with fewer lost documents.

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