How Smarter Infrastructure Moves Transportation Industry Ahead

by Darryl K. Taft

By employing IBM servers and storage management software, MERMEC Group has established a one-day recovery time objective for its critical systems, a first for them. Additionally, MERMEC Group’s railway customers in 45 countries worldwide are able to prevent disruptions and ensure passenger safety across their extensive railway networks. The company expects to see a full return on its IT investments in just two years.

Jet Airways, India’s largest airline and the market leader in domestic air travel, operates 400 flights to 76 destinations worldwide. Cognizant of its own carbon footprint and what it means, not only for the company but also the world at large, Jet Airways automated its analytics process with an IBM server solution that can quickly calculate and predict emissions, helping the airline make effective decisions for buying carbon credits and allowances. The automated solution has reduced reporting errors by 80 percent and dropped the time to compliance for EU emission regulations by 75 percent.

A recent report by the World Economic Forum and The Boston Consulting Group looks at four innovations that have the potential to improve travel, trade and tourism by 2025. These include the ability to ease international travel with an automated smart-visa system, strengthen urban traffic management through real-time data and analytics processing, tailor travel planning to specific customer needs with an intermodal optimization interface, and allow goods to flow more efficiently throughout the world with a logistics optimizer. Through the deployment of advanced mobile, analytics and cloud technologies, these innovations help drive tourism, create millions of new jobs, save billions of dollars and increase global trade volume by 15 percent.

Europe Airpost, a French charter passenger airline and air freight carrier that transports cargo for the national postal service and newspapers, is deploying an IBM private cloud solution consisting of servers, storage and services to improve overall IT system efficiency and performance. The technology has reduced Europe Airpost’s server footprint by 66 percent, lowering energy and cooling requirements, improving cost efficiency and reducing application response times by up to 33 percent, the companies said.

Part of Deutsche Post DHL, DHL Global Forwarding is the group’s air, ocean and road freight forwarder, with services ranging from standardized container transport to end-to-end solutions for industrial projects. DHL Global Forwarding deployed a CRM system on an IBM solution composed of servers, storage, services, and database, virtualization and storage management software. This allowed the transportation and logistics firm to consolidate various sales and customer management systems and provide a single solution for 4,000 employees across 100 countries four months ahead of schedule.

The transport and logistics industry is rapidly adopting cloud technology. According to a Tata Consultancy Services cloud study of 16 industries, transportation and logistics came in eighth place when it came to the number of cloud apps being used per business function in 2011. However, the survey showed respondents in that industry tripling the number of cloud apps they were using by this year, well ahead of the automotive, aerospace/defense and consumer products manufacturing industries.

As an international transport logistics company that runs a network of 200 trucks and 350 trailers, and manages roughly a half-million square feet of warehouse and terminal space in more than 30 countries, Militzer & Munch Group of Switzerland relies on technology to seamlessly manage operations, remove bottlenecks and optimize productivity. With IBM servers, database software, business continuity services and cloud technologies, Militzer & Munch has a 360-degree view of all door-to-door shipments plus insight into profitability and gross margins.

Germany’s BRABUS is an aftermarket tuning company that specializes in customizing high-end automobiles, aircraft and yachts. An increase in Website data volumes led BRABUS to adopt Black Point Arts’ City Cloud IT infrastructure, a partner in the IBM City Cloud program. The City Cloud is based on IBM server and storage technology, giving BRABUS access to IT resources that are positioned to better handle increases in data volumes and improve response times related to images and videos. The cloud solution provides customers in more than 100 countries uninterrupted access to the company’s Web site and interactive car configurator.

Harris Corp. needed an IT solution to support its air-traffic control software package, the Liberty-STAR voice communication system, as it expanded in the Middle East, South Africa and South Asia. Harris deployed IBM servers with software for continuous availability and virtualization to meet requirements for high availability, management control and redundancy.